Last Thursday Rupert Everett called for Oscar Wilde’s body and his literary executor’s ashes to be disenterred in France and buried at Westminster Abbey. Now another Victorian scribe with a rickety lifestyle is a candidate for the abbey.
Serial literary biographer Andrew Lycett, launching his book about Wilkie Collins at Daunt Books in Marylebone last night, called for the thriller writer to be honoured. “A lot of people disapproved of Collins, with his drink-and-drugs habit and his two families by different women, but he was a key Victorian figure and a friend of Conan Doyle and Dickens,” said Lycett.
Spectator reviewer John Sutherland wrote that Lycett was the Hemingway of biographers. “I take that as a compliment,” said Lycett. “In fact, Hemingway would be a good idea for a book.” “No, no, no,” wailed his partner, photographer Sue Greenhill. “Hemingway was a horrible man. I photographed his wife, Martha Gellhorn.”
