Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House, 'The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,' talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map.
Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print.
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.
When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.
Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
But, right now, the situation is that almost all of my writing is out of print.
