Caroline Graves

Caroline Graves lived with Wilkie Collins for most of his adult life, was never married to him, and is buried in his grave. Almost everything about her origins is uncertain: she gave different accounts of her father and her birthplace at different times, was married young to a man named Graves who died, and had a daughter, Harriet, whom Collins treated as his own and educated. The story that she was the model for the woman in white - that Collins and his brother met her one night in Regent's Park fleeing a house where she had been held - was told by Millais's son decades later and is almost certainly a romance, though it has attached itself permanently to both of them. They lived together from about 1858. In 1868, for reasons nobody has established, she left and married a younger man; Collins attended the wedding. Within two years she was back, and stayed until he died in 1889, running his household while he maintained a second one with Martha Rudd and three children a short walk away. Both women knew. He provided for both in his will and asked to be buried with Caroline; she died six years later and was placed in the same grave at Kensal Green, and Harriet paid for it. Collins wrote a will in 1882 dividing his estate between the two households. Her daughter Harriet worked as his amanuensis in his last years when his hands were bad. The Regent s Park story first appeared in print in 1899, ten years after his death.

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