Immediate Impression of Wilkie Collins

Oddly for such an enthusiast of the British novel, I had never read a novel by Wilkie Collins, but one of the points of my reading projects, including the 19th century British fiction project, is to fill in these unconscionable gaps. A true pleasure it is to do so, too. A quarter-way into Collins's most famous (along with The Moonstone) novel, The Woman in White, my impression is that Dickens's friend Wilkie has it all going on; those 150 pages demonstrate extravagant gifts in narrative drive and deftness, in characterization and dialogue, in descriptive prose, and in the cunning art of the set-up. Collins was a prolific novelist, and the received wisdom is that his work went into a steep decline after a one-decade heyday in the 1860s --but I'm going to want to test that for myself. At this point, he has me on trust.