ABSTRACT
Collins at first interspersed his novels with short stories, but stopped writing stories after the success of The Woman in White (1860). This chapter discusses his first period of story-writing, starting with very short and basically Gothic stories, then moving on by 1851 to full-length stories set in the modern period, some of them in continental Europe. By the mid-1850s he often focussed on troubled women, but also used plots where families, both gentry and professional, are troubled by events. In the later 1850s he tended towards crime-focused stories.
