English novelist and mystical writer. She was born in Guernsey, Channel Islands, on September 9, 1851. Mabel Collins liked to refer to herself as a "Nine" because she was the ninth child and was born on the ninth day of the ninth month. In 1871 she married Kenningale Robert Cook, from whom she later separated. Collins joined the Theosophical Society in 1884, becoming a member of the London Lodge. She worked as assistant editor to Helena P. Blavatsky on the periodical Lucifer from September 1887 to February 1889. She was devoted to the welfare of animals and opposed vivisection. Collins was a prolific writer, having produced about a score of novels (several of them three-volume romances a la Barbara Cartland), such as The Prettiest Woman in Warsaw (1885) and Juliet’s Lovers (1893).
Publications include As the Flower Grows (1915), A Cry From Afar (1905), Fragments of Thought and Life (1908), Idyll of the White Lotus (1884), Light on the Path (1885), The Story of Senza (1913), The Story of the Year (1895), Through the Gates of Gold (1887), and When the Sun Moves Northward (1912).