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ANNOUNCEMENTS Victorian Studies Bulletin: mail subscriptions ($5.00 US) to Hartley Spatt, 24 Centre Street, Woodmere, NY 11598. The Northeast Victorian Studies Association will be holding their annual meeting at Princeton University, 20-22 April, 1990. Those wishing to join the NVSA or to renew thendues should send $5.00 US ($3.00 graduate students) to NVSA, English Department, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI 02908. Research Society for Victorian Periodicals: RSVP's meeting this year will be at the Armstrong-Browning Library on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, September 13-15. Local arrangements are being made by Professor Don Vann, Department of English, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203. RSVP's 1991 meeting, with a theme of Transatlantic Connections, will be held in Washington, DC. Readers who would like to put together a session or submit a paper on connections between the Victorian press in Britain and Canada or Britain and the United States should contact Christopher Dahl, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Miller University, Millersville, PA 17551, or Richard Fulton, Dean of Faculty, Clark College, Vancouver, WA 98663. Nineteenth CenturyProse (formerly TheAmoldian) is now under the editorship ofLaurence W. Mazzeno, Department of Literature and Languages, Mesa State College, Grand Junction, CO 81502. Nineteenth Century Prose is seeking manuscripts for "Politicians and Prose," a special number designed to evaluate the rhetoric and function ofwriting among nineteenth century British political figures. Authors are encouraged to submit treatments of both general themes and specific author/politicians such as (but not limited to) William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, John Morley, Arthur Balfour, T.B. Macaulay, James Bryce, Richard Cobden, George Cornewall Lewis, and Henry Brougham. Manuscripts should conform to MLA style and should be submitted in duplicate to Professor John Powell, Department of History, Hannibal-LaGrange College, Hannibal, MI 63401, no later than 1 December, 1990. Northeast Victorian Studies Association: VICTORIANENDINGS, a conference to be held April 26-28, 1991, at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. Please send all papers or abstracts (10 copies) to Dr. Saundra Segan Wheeler, Program Coordinator, English Department, Yeshiva University, 500 W. 185th Street, New York, NY 10033. Deadline for proposals and abstracts is October 12, 1990. Announcements111 REPORT ON THE WILKIE COLLINS CONFERENCE A remarkable increase in the studies of Wilkie Collins this past decade shows that scholars are now taking him very seriously indeed. So does the number of those who attended the conference, held by the University of Victoria at its Dunsmuir Lodge Conference Centre from September 29 to October 1, 1989, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the novelist's death. Forty-eight delegates, representing eight Canadian universities, from Vancouver to St John's, as well as many from the United States and England were present. Sixteen papers were delivered, five by Canadian academics (including three by young scholars on the threshold of their careers). Extra events included a comprehensive display of slides by Andrew Gasson, of the Wilkie Collins Society, and a rousing Victorian parlour entertainment by students from UVic's Fine Arts Faculty. Over an intensive two days, the papers ranged from biographical studies with significant new information, through historical data (four papers came from historians and specialists in areas other than literature), to examinations of the range of novels, emphasizing some lesser known ones. Kirk Beetz (Sacramento) opened the proceedings with an amusing and wide-ranging case for "Why Wilkie Collins is a Great Writer." The rest of the speakers took up the challenge. Several things became evident as the meeting proceeded. First, now that some of the fog has cleared from Wilkie's unorthodox marital arrangements, learning more of his daily doings, professional and domestic, will allow for further insights in the future (as has happened in Trollope's case). Just one example: Catherine Peters (Oxford) had the delegates agog with her discoveries about the women in Wilkie's life. Strong, independent women appear often enough in his fiction; they also existed in his family. An aunt, Margaret Carpenter, was portrait-painter and breadwinner, but more importantly, his own mother learned the hard way to survive on her own resources. Harriet Collins's long-lost manuscript tells of eight years as a working woman, first...

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