An unprepossessing-looking fellow … Wilkie Collins.
My hero: Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett
Saturday 21 September 2013
Wilkie Collins's No Name is perhaps the most accessible of his "sensation" novels. It tells of two sisters who find themselves dispossessed when their parents die. Cue for one, Magdalen Vanstone, to try every ruse imaginable to regain her birthright and "name". With her nod to the Biblical fallen woman, Magdalen is a typical Collins heroine – sexy, self-willed, eager to fight manmade laws and establish her position in society. She is not one of Dickens's limp child-women.
Collins espoused female causes because he hated oppression. Having battled to escape his domineering father, he targeted hypocrisy wherever he saw it – from marriage laws to animal rights. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he had no time for pomposity, preferring to indulge his appetites for food, drink and sex, enjoy the company of friends, and become a supremely professional writer. This unprepossessing-looking fellow maintained two separate families, wasn't married to either woman, and kept the details quiet. But that's what makes his story so intriguing.
His mistresses and children did not enjoy properly fulfilled lives in that unliberated age. But Collins was clear he opposed marriage, which he considered institutionalised prostitution, and injurious to both sexes.
No Name has a magnificent scene where Magdalen, married to a man she despises, attempts to swap places with her maid, who works to support her illegitimate child. Magdalen understands not only that they are both victims of matrimony, but that their social positions are interchangeable – a truly Collins epiphany.
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