The Law and the Lady

The Law and the Lady
ISBN: 9780140436075
Publication Date: 24 September 1998

By the time The Law and the Lady appeared in 1875, The Woman in White and The Moonstone had already established Collins as the leading practitioner of 'sensation fiction.' The Law and the Lady builds on this tradition by introducing one of English literature's earliest woman detectives, Valeria Woodville, who investigates the murder of her husband's first wife, in the attempt to prove him guiltless.

About the Author

Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846, having spent five years in the tea business, he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the legal knowledge that was to give him much material for his writing.

From the early fifties, he was a friend of Charles Dickens, acting with him, contributing to Household Words, travelling with him on the Continent. Dickens produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse (1855) and The Frozen Deep (1857).

Collins is best remembered for his novels, particularly The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which T. S. Eliot called 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'. His later, and at the time rather sensational, novels include The New Magdalen (1873) and The Law and The Lady (1875). Collins also braved the moral censure of the Victorian age by keeping two women (and their households) while marrying neither. He died in 1889.