Wilkie Collins had the longest writing career of any major mid-19th-century English novelist, writing short stories and novels from 1844 to 1889. Literary criticism, however, has traditionally seen him as only notable for his two mystery novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).
While these are some of the century’s earliest, and best mysteries, praising only them ignores the social and political themes common in Collins’s work, especially his later novels.
