Forever preoccupied by the apparent instability and fragility of the female identity, in his great novels of the 1860s Wilkie Collins reframed mainstream contemporary ideas about gender, marriage and power in terms of deception, fraud and crime. Often seen in his own time as a technically brilliant craftsman or ‘pure plotter’ and talked up by his publisher as the ‘King of Inventors’, today Collins receives considerable critical attention as a master of popular genre fiction. By interweaving the workings of the respectable world and its anarchic criminal underbelly, he asks awkward questions about the validity of the legal, moral and social power structures of Victorian England.
In No Name, the narrative’s byzantine twists and turns trace the contrasting fortunes of the Vanstone sisters, Norah and Magdalen, as they ‘suffer a violent peripeteia from affluence and respectability to penniless illegitimacy’ (Peters 1992, pp. 249–50). Exploring what happens when the law excludes and disgraces two innocent young women in defiance of morality and natural justice, Collins delivers another of his trademark subversive cultural critiques in the guise of a superbly entertaining thriller.
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