An expert in 19th-century fiction, Catherine Peters previously served as a Lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford. Her work focuses on deep literary analysis.
Written in the same decade as "The Moonstone" and "The Woman in White", Collins' novel deals with such issues of the Victorian era as the unsatisfactory marriage laws, the emergence of the autonomous, sexually active woman and the growing scientific intrusion into the privacy of the psyche.
Wilkie Collins's intriguing story about a blind girl, Lucilla Finch, and the identical twins who both fall in love with her, has the exciting complications of his better-known novels but it also overturns conventional expectations. Using a background of myth and fairy-tale to expand the boundaries of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Collins gives one of the best accounts in fiction of blindness and its implications.