The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins was born on January 8th, 1824 in London. The landscape painter William Collins was his father. Wilkie Collins spent part of his childhood in Italy, where he received little formal education. At the age of 17, he entered into an apprenticeship with a tea trade company. He then went on to study law and became a barrister – though he never practiced law. Versatile and talented, Collins wavered for many years between wanting to become a painter or a writer. In 1851, he exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 1850 he published his first novel, Antonina. One year later, he met Charles Dickens, who was to become his mentor and friend. The two traveled the United Kingdom and the United States together and collaborated on many stories. Collins was a prolific writer: He wrote 25 novels and 50 stories, but his most successful works were The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which gained him great success and admiration from the public. Collins never married but was in relationships with two women at the same time. He had three children with Martha Rudd, who was 20 years his junior. The older Caroline Graves married another man, but after his death returned to Collins. The love triangle continued until Collins’s death. Collins suffered from rheumatism all his life, and he regularly took laudanum, an opiate, to control the pain. After Dickens’s death in 1870, Collins’s addiction to the drug became serious, resulting in hallucinations and the loss of mental faculty. He died of a heart attack on September 23, 1889 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.