She's a good character, but not really in the same category as the better characters from The Woman in White and No Name-your Counts Fosco and Captains Wragge. One could easily do a feminist reading of the novel with her at the center: she really is who she is due to circumstances forced upon her by society, and the fact that Midwinter, coming from a similarly adverse situation, makes out okay, demonstrates, if demonstration was needed, that there is definitely a gendered aspect to this (and Midwinter himself, for reasons never adequately explained, behaves in a way that leads to her downfall, which kind of makes me hate him, though it may just be due to a clumsy effort on Collins' part to make what he wanted to happen happen). Her moral struggles with herself are the most compelling thing here she's effectively tragic. She basically devours the entire back half of the novel with her around, the other characters look even more attenuated. The most interesting character in the book by a wide margin-and, one could convincingly argue, the protagonist as well as the antagonist-is Lydia Gwilt, a remorseless manipulator who, in spite of initial appearance, is nonetheless prey to fits of genuine sentiment. When I was reading No Name, I would frequently finish a chapter and mentally insert a dramatic chipmunk here, that rarely seemed necessary. The final chapter is genuinely suspenseful, but beyond that, not really so much. Even by Victorian standards, this is a bloated novel (it's the first Collins I've read that tops eight hundred pages), and it never really achieves the kind of focus that I think it needs. Bashwood, an old man in love with Miss Gwilt and GAH. Millroy's insane belief that Miss Gwilt is trying to seduce her husband and her efforts to stop him, oh no never mind, now Miss Gwilt is going to marry Midwinter and oh also here are these two lawyers, Pedgifts Sr and Jr, who are fairly extensively characterized but don't do all that much and they displace Allan's estate's previous lawyer which seems like a conflict but then never is and also here's this pathetic Mr. Is it about Midwinter's secret? Yes it is, and it's also about this dream that Allan has that supposedly has prophetic power in some vague way, oh wait, it's really about Miss Gwilt's machinations, wait, no, it's actually about Mrs. The problem is, the novel is constantly veering off in different directions, such that it's very difficult to get a grip on the damn thing. So that sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, it isn't.

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