Man and Wife (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Collins, Wilkie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199538174 ISBN 13: 9780199538171

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2008

Synopsis

`This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day.

Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society.

Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the `sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.
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About this title

From the Back Cover:

Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the elder son of a successful painter, William Collins. He left school at 17, and after an unhappy spell as a clerk in a tea broker's office, during which he wrote his first, unpublished novel, he entered Lincoln's Inn as a law student in 1846. He considered a career as a painter, but after the publication, in 1848, of his life of his father, and a novel, Antonina, in 1850, his future as a writer was assured. His meeting with Dickens in 1851 was perhaps the turning-point of his career. The two became collaborators and lifelong friends. Collins contributed to Dickens's magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, and his two best-known novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, were first published in All the Year Round. Collins's private life was as complex and turbulent as his novels. He never married, but lived with a widow, Mrs. Caroline Graves, from 1858 until his death. He also had three children by a younger woman, Martha Rudd, whom he kept in a separate establishment. Collins suffered from 'rheumatic gout', a form of arthritis which made him an invalid in his later years, and he became addicted to the laudanum he took to ease the pain of the illness. He died in 1889.

About the Author:

Norman Page is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Nottingham. The author of numerous books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, he is the editor of Mad Monkton in World's Classics, and Consultant Editor for the works of Thomas Hardy in Everyman Paperbacks. He lives in Oakham, Rutland.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199538174
• ISBN 13: 9780199538171
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688
• Editor: Page Norman