Books: Weird Wilkie

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THE LIFE OF WILKIE COLLINS (360 pp.) Nuel Pharr Davis—University of Illinois ($5.75).

It was a bright, moonlit night, and so, after entertaining Painter John Millais and his son at dinner, Wilkie Collins decided to see them home. Strolling together along the semirural roads of northern London, the three friends were halted suddenly by a piercing scream, and from out the gate of a villa dashed a young woman "dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight." Painter Millais exclaimed: "What a beautiful woman!", while Novelist Collins disappeared into the night crying: "I must see who she is and what's the matter."

So successful was Collins' pursuit that "the woman in white," Caroline Graves, was his mistress throughout his life. Nobody knows if the story she told him—that she was fleeing from a brutal hypnotist who kept her imprisoned in his villa—is true or not, but many still know the great piece of fiction that Wilkie Collins made of it. The Woman in White ran in 1859-60 as a serial in Charles Dickens' magazine, All the Year Round, and though it followed Dickens' own Tale of Two Cities, it boosted circulation above even the Dickens level. Serialized in the U.S. by Harper's Magazine at the same time, it was still in print under the Harper label 70 years later.

Wilkie Collins is recognized today as one of the most influential and readable of Victorian novelists. In an age when the three-volume serialized novel offered mostly narrative sprawl and chaos, Collins fashioned plot lines of watchwork precision for 36 separate books, including his masterpieces, The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Like his U.S. literary lookalike, Edgar Allan Poe, Collins used words as black magic to conjure up horror, doom and desolation. Some of this was sheer melodramatics, but in part it foreshadowed the revolt of the natural man against an age of prudery. Compared to his friend Dickens, the English writing colossus of the century, Collins was a minor Victorian, but in the sense that Marlowe is a minor Elizabethan alongside Shakespeare. He was the best of the secondbest, and his growing status as "must" reading for highbrow novelists has been signalized by a T. S. Eliot essay. This biography by Nuel Pharr Davis, a University of Illinois English instructor, is intellectually skimpy, but as a personal history of Collins it is thorough, which may be just as well: Collins' life was no less intriguing than his books.

Eccentric Human Nature. He was the son of a stuffy, snobbish Royal Academician named William Collins, whose only aim in life was to climb to the top of the ladder, kicking off old friends at every rung. Wilkie rebelled violently against his father's way of life—particularly because the elder Collins always deemed his social climbing to be a form of Christian uplift. Consequently, Wilkie developed a lifelong aversion to religion, preferred low society to high, and liked to dress for dinner in camel's-hair coats and pink shirts. He was shortsighted and short of stature, with tiny hands and feet. "Ordinary men," reports Biographer Davis, "could pick him up and carry him about like a child."