Wilkie Collins in Context, ed. by William Baker and Richard Nemesvari

Edited by William Baker and Richard Nemesvari, Wilkie Collins in Context is an extensive collection of essays that mark the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins’s birth by celebrating the multifaceted life of the author in four parts: life and works, critical response and afterlife, literary contexts, and cultural and social contexts. In the preface, Baker and Nemesvari put emphasis firstly on the treatment of Collins’s writing in his age as belonging to a second-class status, stemming from the fact that the most impact he had on the period’s culture has been through his sensation novels, especially The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins in Context makes an invaluable contribution to the current scholarship of Collins, especially by including an extensive context regarding Collins in the same place as knowledge of his life and critical reception of his work.