[6] While studying at Cambridge, she was awarded the 2016 Michael Holroyd prize for non-fiction (or, as he termed it, "recreative writing") for her work Knocking on Walcott's Door, described as "a form of literary autobiography".

[7] The Confessions of Frannie Langton takes the form of the deposition of a woman charged with murder, written for her trial at the Old Bailey in London in 1826.

Frannie Langton had grown up enslaved on a Jamaican sugar plantation, where her slave-owner had employed her in his research "desperate to prove that Africans aren't human".

[10] Reviewing the book in The Guardian, Natasha Pulley praised it and said "Between her historical research, Frannie's voice and a plot that never slows to a walk, the novel pulls the gothic into new territory and links it back to its origins.

[11][12] In 2020, ITV announced that they had commissioned Collins to adapt The Confessions of Frannie Langton for the 2023 four-part television series with Drama Republic, beginning in August 2021 and wrapping in November.