By Valerie Fehlbaum
Wednesday from 12.30 to 13.45pm, on 8 and 22 January, 5 and 19 February, 5 and 19 March, 2 and 16 April 2025
After obtaining her B.A. at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, Valerie Fehlbaum moved to Switzerland where she taught English as a Foreign Language for a few years before joining the English Department at the University of Geneva. She then went on to obtain an M.A. in Gender Studies and a Ph.D. on the New Woman at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her subsequent monograph on Ella Hepworth Dixon was initially published by Ashgate in 2005 and republished in paperback by Taylor & Francis in 2019. She has also lectured at the University of Neuchâtel and tutored with the Open University.
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), a close friend and associate of Charles Dickens, is often credited with inventing the mystery or crime novel, as well as producing so-called Sensation fiction. ‘I am sick to death of novels with an earnest purpose. I’m sick to death of outbursts of eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic description, and unsparing anatomy of the human heart, and all that sort of thing…’, he writes in 1859. ‘What I want,’ he continues, ‘is something…. that keeps me reading, reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end.’ In this atelier we shall read two of his most famous works and attempt to evaluate the extent to which he achieves his proclaimed aims.