Sensation novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins exhibits the sort of mastery over narration and plot that keeps even modern readers gripped to the edges of their seats. As early as his boyhood days at private boarding school, Collins discovered a skill and a love for inventing tales. His first published work was a memoir in honor of his recently-departed father. Though this work was a labor of love, it sparked a fire within Collins that would illuminate his long writing career to come. 
Collins soon turned to novels, publishing his first two — Antonia, or the Fall of Rome and Basil — in 1850 and 1852 respectively. Between these two novels, Collins met Charles Dickens in London, and the two began a life-long friendship that would shape Victorian literature. The mutual admiration between these two wordsmiths nurtured a very fruitful writing partnership as well, with each mentoring the other in areas of their shared craft. Dickens helped Collins improve his character writing, and Collins in turn imparted useful wisdom on plot and suspense that were essential in the creation of great works like Great Expectations. Collins wrote serially for Dickens’ periodical All the Year Round, and it was there he published perhaps his best known work today, The Woman in White. Inspired by a true crime, this tale of love, greed, and violence is told from alternating perspectives, a structure which is common today but was groundbreaking when Collins was on the scene.
Though his popularity faltered after his death in 1889, Collins’ innovative narrative techniques seismically impacted the development of Victorian literature, the mystery genre, and fiction as a whole. These same techniques which captivated Dickens and other Victorian readers have spurred modern authors to pick up his works and discover the twisting, mysterious world of Wilkie Collins.