An English novelist, playwright, and short story writer William Wilkie Collins was born at 11 New Cavendish Street, Marylebone, London, the son of a well-known Royal Academician landscape painter, William Collins and his wife, Harriet Geddes. A skilful manipulator of intricate plots, Collins is remembered as a principal founder of English detective fiction. His novels of intrigue and suspense,... Read More
A young woman marries an older man and arrives at his house, only to find that his dead wife is still there… A picture in a tower depicts a dangerous woman… A dead man walks through a house every night because sometimes the dead do come back… Stories about ghosts and suspense. What can be better? Especially when these stories come from Victorian writers and Rudyard Kipling himself. Kipling's bi... Read More
Herbert George Wells was an English writer, who is now best remembered for his science fiction novels. In Britain, Wells's work was a key model for the British "Scientific Romance", and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon, J. D. Beresford, S. Fowler Wright, and Naomi Mitchison, all drew on Wells's example. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid is a cautionary tale, the moral of whi... Read More
H.G. Wells was a famous science fiction writer. The science fiction historian John Clute describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen", and notes his work has been central to both British and American science fiction. Science fiction author and critic Algis Budrys said Wells "remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the despair, which are embodied in the t... Read More
Sir Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771. He was the ninth child of Walter Scott, a Writer to the Signet, and Anne Rutherford. His father was a member of a cadet branch of the Scotts Clan, and his mother descended from the Haliburton family, the descent from whom granted Walter's family the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey. As a boy, youth, and young man, Scott was fascinated by... Read More
Charles Dickens enjoyed popularity during his lifetime than had any previous author. Much in his work could appeal to the simple and the sophisticated, to the poor and to the queen. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campa... Read More