ABSTRACT
Collins’ early novels were exotic – Ioláni (written mid-1840s, published 1999) was set in Polynesia and rejected by a publisher, while Antonina (1847) presents in learned Gibbonesque style an attack by Goths on ancient Rome. Modernity appeared in the novella Mr Wray’s Cash-Box (1851) and then Collins turned to novels of family and mystery, England in the near present, as in Basil (1852) and Hide and Seek (1854). He turned to Italy with the novella. The Yellow Mask (1855), and revolutionary France with another novella, Sister Rose (1856), then turned to novels of crime and mystery with A Rogue’s Life (1856) and The Dead Secret (1857), then fulfilled this genre with The Woman in White (1860).
