He began as early as 1850--the dividing year--with _Antonina_: but his three great triumphs in the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were _The Dead Secret_ (1857), _The Woman in White_ (1860), and _No Name_ (1862).
Throughout the sixties and a little later, in _Armadale_ (1866), _The Moonstone_ (1870), perhaps _The New Magdalen_ (1873), and even as late as 1875 in _The Law and the Lady_, his work continued to be eagerly read.

But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years or so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did not tend to keep it up in quality.

Although Collins had a considerable amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever be put permanently high.

It has a certain resemblance in method to Godwin and Mrs.Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading, sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the old dramatic sense) at the end.

Perhaps the best example is the way in which Magdalen Vanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, though more than half justifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal accident which leaves her and her sister with "No Name" and no fortune, are foiled by the course of events, though the family property is actually recovered for this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive.