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Birth date
Wilkie Collins was born on January 8, 1824 in Marleybone, London. -
Caroline Graves
Caroline came from a humble family, having married young, had a child, and been widowed. Collins lived close to the small shop kept by Caroline, and the two may have met in the neighborhood in the mid–1850s. Collins disliked the institution of marriage, but remained dedicated to Caroline and Harriet, considering them to be his family. She left him while he wrote The Moonstone. She then married a younger man named Joseph Clow, but returned to Collins after two years -
Antonina, or The Fall of Rome (1850)
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Basil (1852)
Basil, son of a father who values the family pedigree and who would not let him marry below his station, falls in love at first sight with a girl he sees on a bus. He follows her and discovers she is Margaret Sherwin, only daughter of a linen draper. He persuades her father to let him marry her secretly. -
Hide and Seek (1854)
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After Dark (1856)
After Dark is a collection of six short stories by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1856. It was the author's first collection of short stories. Five of the stories were previously published in Household Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens. -
The Dead Secret (1856)
The Secret of the title is the parentage of the heroine, Rosamond Treverton, who has been passed off as the daughter of the wealthy former actress Mrs Treverton of Porthgenna Tower, but is in fact the illegitimate child of her servant Sarah Leeson by a local miner . Sarah writes down the details of the Secret from the words of the dying Mrs Treverton, and hides the paper bearing the message in an unused room at Porthgenna. -
Martha Rudd
In 1868, Collins met Martha Rudd in Winterton-on-Sea in Norfolk, and the two began a liaison. She was 19 years old and from a large, poor family. She moved to London to be closer to him a few years later.
When he was with Martha he assumed the name William Dawson, and she and their children used the last name of Dawson themselves. -
Period: to
The sons of wilkie collins
Their daughter Marian was born in 1869, their second daughter, Harriet Constance, in 1871 and their son, William Charles, in 1874. -
Day of death
He died in london from a stroke
