*His plots are framed with artistic ingenuity -- he unfolds them bit by bit, clearly, and with great care -- and each chapter is a most skilful sequel to the chapter before. He does not attempt to paint character or passion. He is not in the least imaginative. He is not by any means a master of pathos. The fascination which he exercises over the mind of his reader consists in this -- that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume.
With him, accordingly, character, passion, and pathos are mere accessory colouring which he employs to set off the central situation in his narrative. ... Men and women he draws, not for the sake of illustrating human nature and life’s varied phases, or exercising his own powers of creation, but simply and solely with reference to the part it is necessary they should play in tangling or disentangling his argument.

                                                               Unsigned Review, Saturday Review, 10, (25 August 1860): 249- 50
 

                 *The Woman in White is the latest, and by many degrees the best work of an author who had already written so many singularly good ones. That mastery in the art of construction for which Mr. Wilkie Collins has long been pre-eminent among living writers of fiction is here exhibited upon the largest, and proportionately, the most difficult scale he has yet attempted. To keep the reader’s attention fairly and equably on the alert throughout a continuous story that fills three volumes of the ordinary novel form, is no common feat; but the author of the Woman in White has done much more than this. Every two of his thousand and odd pages contain as much printed matter as three or four of those to which the majority of Mr. Mudie’s subscribers are most accustomed, and from his first page to his last the interest is progressive, cumulative, and absorbing.

                                                                                   Unsigned Review, Spectator, 33 (8 September 1860): 864
 
 
 

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