Wilkie Collins’s Library: A Reconstruction

Wilkie Collins (1824‐1889) was a major Victorian novelist who effectively mastered the novel of mystery, and even terror, in a subtle and engaging way, famous for The Women in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). He was widely regarded by literary critics of the twentieth century, such as T.S. Eliot, as an essential master of the English detective novel, and certainly, he was a superb craftsman, with a unique ability to create and sustain an elaborate and well‐defined mystery plot.

The book here under review is a significant and thorough study of his library that was dispersed after his death:...