Wilkie Collins (January 8, 1824 – September 23, 1889) was an English novelist.  Some of his best-known works are The Woman in White  and The Moonstone.

Peter Ackroyd has written a bibliography about this famous Victorian and good friend of Charles Dickens.

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely near-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colorful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women—and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter 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 a writer, his years of fame and his lifelong friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens.

Order Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd