Lecture: Female Identity in the Writings of Wilkie Collins

2026 Lecture Series: Marylebone Minds – Past and Present

Wilkie Collins was one of the most compelling and controversial writers of the Victorian age: a master of suspense, a sharp social critic, and a figure deeply engaged with the moral and legal questions of his time. Best known today for pioneering the sensation novel, Collins used gripping plots and unforgettable characters to expose injustices that lay beneath the surface of respectable society. His fiction captivated nineteenth-century readers not only because it thrilled and unsettled, but because it asked difficult questions about power, identity, and the limits of the law.

St Marylebone was not merely a backdrop to Collins’s life, but a place of personal and lasting significance. He was baptised in the parish church and spent much of his life living in the surrounding area. This talk situates Collins within the world he knew intimately, exploring his life, writing, and connections to the St Marylebone area, before turning to the themes that made his work so provocative. It discusses Collins’s critique of the laws pertaining to married women and property, his interest in representing ‘madness’ and lunatic asylums, and the ways in which he explored female identity in novels such as The Woman in White (1859), Armadale (1866), and Man and Wife (1870).

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