Wilkie Collins’s intriguing story about Lucilla Finch, a blind girl 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 nineteenthcentury realist fi ction, Collins gives one of the best accounts in fi ction of blindness and its implications. Using a background of myth and fairy-tale to expand the boundaries of nineteenth century realist fi ction, Collins not only takes a blind person as his central character but also explores the idea of blindness and its implications.
