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. 

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

An interesting book as I remember (at 27 years' distance now). Not as enjoyable as The Moonstone or The Woman in White, but a lot of fun. I do remember being a bit squicked out though when said murderess dies and in her final moments something "soft and womanly" comes swimming into her expression, like a renunciation of everything that had made her remarkable up to that point in favour of a conventional Dickensian femininity. But I may be misremembering. It's been a while, as I said.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Lydia Gwilt is a tremendous creation. I could take the ending. It's well prepared for: We know that she loves Midwinter and that she's sick of herself. Her last words to him- before she enters the poison chamber- "It is no merit to have loved you... you are one of the men whom women all like." is worthy of her intelligence.

I love Dickens, but he was incapable of creating a female character (or indeed a male character) as ambiguous and fascinating as this. I'm glad Collins allowed her to die with dignity.