Unequal Partners is a well-written, well-researched, sharply focused book that excels in training our attention on the asymmetries of Dickens's and Collins's professional relationship. In the early 1850's, Dickens was clearly the master, Collins the apprentice, but this model gradually lost applicability as Collins matured as a writer.
― Novel
For more than a century, Wilkie Collins's reputation has been overshadowed by that of Charles Dickens, a situation that Nayder goes far toward rectifying.... Nayder's critiques of Collins's The Moonstone faced off by Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood are highlights in this study.
― Choice
In Unequal Partners, Nayder graphs a progressively difficult partnership from Collins's initial hero-worship of The Inimitable,... through a more equitable division of labors which still excluded control of the total artistic vision of a work, to Collins's parting company with Dickens in 1862 after eight Christmas Stories.... When Collins returned, he was an established author prepared to challenge the authority of the journal's 'Conductor.' Finally, Nayder provides a refreshing and challenging reading of The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood as diametrically opposed in matters of gender and race.
― Victorian Web
Nayder's juxtaposition of fact and fiction, and her painstaking scholarship, offer fresh insights which renew interest in works which seemingly contain a key to the productive, yet often strained, alliance, between these two nineteenth-century authors.
― Yearbook of English Studies
The Dickens/Collins collaborations and competitions were productive in the authors' lifetimes and subsequently. Lillian Nayder's thorough, clear, and partisan account of Collins's role will assuredly be answered by Dickensians. But they had better consider all her evidence, including the ambiguous, changing material conditions of writing that affected both authors' careers. For she has constructed an exemplary case for the subordinate who rose from dependent to independent Victorian author.
― Victorian Periodical Review To one who has long awaited a readable, scholarly account of the personal and publishing relationship between Dickens and Collins this book is as welcome as it is indispensable. Whether your admiration tends more toward Dickens or Collins, you will find this account of their differing views on racism, imperialism, and what Nayder calls 'gender inequality'elegantly set forth. The mysterious influence and mastery the two men had over one another is here fully illuminated.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun About the Author
Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of The Other Dickens, also from Cornell.
