Wilkie Collins: A Critical and Biographical Study

by Dorothy L. Sayers

In June 1928, Sayers began a critical and biographical work on Wilkie Collins. Although it was never finished, the Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries published the incomplete work in 1977

Genres: Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1977

About the author

The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

This renowned author and Christian humanist studied classical and modern languages.

Her best known mysteries, a series of short novels, set between World War I and World War II, feature an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth. She is also known for her plays and essays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...

Reviews

[Bardfilm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This unfinished biography / literary analysis of Wilkie Collins' work is good, but necessarily rough. We all wish that she had finished the work; I personally wish she had started with mid- to late-career Collins. I'd love to know her thoughts on The Moonstone, The Woman in White, or The Law and the Lady (in the last of which I detect a very key influence on Sayers' own fiction).

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warning: unfinished. Only gets us to his third novel, and leaves Collins a little shadowy, under the shadows of his father, Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, and Dickens. Such a shame that she got this far and no farther, because it’s as readable and insightful as anything she’s written. Couldn’t she have finished this before she dug into Dante?