Product Descriptionackroyd At His Best -- Gripping Short Life Of The Extraordinary Wilkie Collins Author Of The Moonstoneand The Woman In White.Short And Oddly Built With A Head Too Big For His Body Extremely Short-Sighted Unable To Stay Still Dressed In Colourful Clothes As If Playing A Certain Part In The Great General Drama Of Life Wilkie Collins Looked Distinctily Strange. But He Was None The Less A Charmer Befriended By The Great Loved By Children Irresistibly Attractive To Women -- And Avidly Read By Generations Of Readers.Ackroyd Follows His Hero The Sweetest-Tempered Of All The Victorian Novelists From His Childhood As The Son Of A Well-Known Artist To His Struggling Beginnings As Writer His Years Of Fame And His Life-Long Friendship With The Other Great London Chronicler Charles Dickens. A True Londoner Collins Like Dickens Was Fascinated By The Secrets And Crimes -- The Fraud Blackmail And Poisonings -- That Lay Hidden Behind The City S Respectable Facade. He Was A Fighter Never Afraid To Point Out Injustices And Shams Or To Tackle The Establishment Head On. As Well As His Enduring Masterpieces The Moonstone -- Often Called The First True Detective Novel -- And The Sensational Women In White He Produced An Intriguing Array Of Lesser Known Works. But Collins Had His Own Secrets: He Never Married But Lived For Thirty Years With The Widowed Caroline Graves And Also Had A Second Liaison As Mr And Mrs Dawson With A Younger Mistress Martha Rudd With Whom He Had Three Children. Both Women Remained Devoted As Illness And Opium-Taking Took Their Toll: He Died In 1889 In The Middle Of Writing His Last Novel -- Blind Love.Told With Peter Ackroyd S Inimitable Verve This Is A Ravishingly Entertaining Life Of A Great Story-Teller Full Of Surprises Rich In Humour And Sympathetic Understanding.About The Authorpeter Ackroyd Is The Author Of London: The Biography Albion: The Origins Of The English Imagination Shakespeare: The Biography And Thames: The Biography. He Has Written Acclaimed Biographies Of T. S. Eliot Dickens Blake And Sir Thomas More As Well As Several Successful Novels. He Has Won The Whitbread Book Award For Biography The Royal Society Of Literature S William Heinemann Award The James Tait Black Memorial Prize The Guardian Fiction Prize The Somerset Maugham Award And The South Bank Award For Literature. His Last Book Was A Biography Of Charlie Chaplin.From The Hardcover Edition.