Armadale: Wilkie Collins

[poliphilo]

I thought this was going to be a very silly book, but in the end it wasn't. It has melodrama, social comedy, a collection of striking and memorable characters and the most sympathetic murderess in Victorian fiction. Contemporaries found it immoral. You bet it is. Collins was a proto-feminist and hated middle-class morality.  His relish for criminal psychology is such that I kept wondering whether Dostoevsky had read him.