According to Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more - especially about Collins's family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries. As its title suggests, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins is sensational stuff, both in the Victorian and modern senses of 'sensation'. But what kind of insight does a 'secret life' give us, and why do we want this kind of book so urgently? More urgently than we want the bulk of Collins's thirty or so novels, most of which are out of print and destined to stay so. Why does public demand commission 'unauthorised' biographies, designed to crash the barriers which authors erect around their private lives?

LRB 15 September 1988 | PDF Download