The Woman in White is, for many critics, the ‘archetype of the genre’ of sensation fiction, and its author is the master of its characteristic form, the novel with a secret. Indeed, secretiveness is not simply the structuring principle of the sensation plot, it is also its origin, and subject. Like most sensation narratives, Collins's plots also relied heavily upon the combination of roguery, hypocrisy and concealment that, as the quotation from Armadale at the head of this chapter suggests, was at the centre of modern life. In his own day Collins was the sensation novelist who was most highly regarded by reviewers and commentators on the contemporary cultural scene. Recent critical reassessments of his work have tended to confirm this placing, and to endorse Collins's own claims to originality as a writer who, as he puts it in his preface to Armadale ‘oversteps, in more than one direction, the narrow limits within which [critics] are disposed to restrict the development of modern fiction’ (A 4). Certainly, Collins's self-justificatory prefaces to his novels suggest that he regarded his own fictional practice more seriously than some of his fellow sensationalists – whether as source of shocks and thrills, as social or moral critique, as metaphysical investigation, or as narrative form. Collins was the master of all of the main elements of the sensation novel: the construction and unravelling of an intricate, crossword puzzle plot, the atmospheric scene, the mysterious, prophetic dream, obsessive and disordered mental states, overtly respectable villains, and bold, assertive and/or devious and scheming heroines and villainesses. Moreover, his fragmented, multi-vocal narratives were among the boldest experimentations with narrative form to be found in the sensation mode.

Many of Collins's novels have remained firm favourites with readers. However, despite T.S. Eliot 's praise for his work in the Times Literary Supplement in 1927, for much of the first half of the twentieth century Collins was regarded ‘as Dickens's rather lightweight protégé and dubious companion – an interesting figure in the development of genre fiction, but not really worth sustained academic study’.