ABSTRACT
Basil: A Story of Modern Life is Wilkie Collins’s second published novel. It lacks, to use Barbara Hardy’s words ‘the depth and intensity of the allusions’ found in later work such as The Women in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). Responding to an email asking whether she had written about Collins, and if not why not, she replied: ‘No, I haven’t written about Collins at all, though I read and re-read him, and admire his self-analysing narrative technique and his brilliant plotting. Don’t know why — he writes sufficiently well but isn’t as good, not as intellectually and imaginatively demanding, as everyone else I’ve written about at length.’ Barbara Hardy adds that she has ‘always admired the characters, narrative form and plot’.1
