Wilkie Collins Charles DIC ProcterWilkie Collins was an English author and playwright who lived from 8 January 1824 to 23 September 1889. He is best known for his works The Woman in White (1859), a mystery and early "sensation novel," and The Moonstone (1868), which has been dubbed te first modern English detective fiction. When he was twelve, he traveled to Italy with his parents, painters William Collins and Harriet Geddes, where they lived for two years while he learned both Italian and French. He began his career selling tea. Following the publication of Antonina, his debut book, in 1850, Collins became friends with and a mentor to Charles Dickens. Dickens' journals All the Year Round and Household Words published some of his writing. They also worked together on fiction and drama. By the 1860s, Collins had achieved financial security and a large following worldwide. However, he developed an opium addiction, which caused him to lose both his health and the caliber of his work in the 1870s and 1880s. Collins criticized the institution of marriage. He divided his time between younger Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children, and widow Caroline Graves, with whom he lived for the majority of his life and treated her daughter as his. Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on September 29, 1810, in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, London (now 93 Cheyne Walk). Anthony Todd Thomson delivered her, and his sister Catherine went on to become Gaskell's stepmother. She was the youngest of eight children, and only she and her brother John survived infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, a Unitarian from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was preacher at Failsworth, Lancashire, but resigned on ethical reasons. He traveled to London in 1806 with the expectation of being named private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who would later become Governor General of India. Adelaide Anne Procter was an English poet and philanthropist. Her writing career began as a teenager, with poetry published in Charles Dickens' periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round, followed by feminist journals Read More Read Less