About this Event
About the lecture:
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).
About the speaker:
Dr Anne-Marie Beller is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at Loughborough University. Her research interests are in Victorian fiction, particularly Sensation Fiction and crime writing, and she has published extensively on Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among other writers. Anne-Marie is interested in health and medicine in the Victorian period, and her recent work has focused on mental health in the nineteenth century, the history of psychiatry, and Victorian Lunatic Asylums. Her current project explores the networks between Victorian writers and psychiatrists, and the impact of medical knowledge on representations of insanity in the second half of the century. Anne-Marie was General Editor of The Wilkie Collins Journal (2012 – 2016) and she remains on the Editorial Board.
Located in the Church Crypt
There will be time after for questions and dsicussions.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
St Marylebone Parish Church, 17 Marylebone Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 8.00
