Wilkie Collins’s No Name in All The Year Round

Abstract

In 1861, the year following the publication of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins found himself contending with two female rivals, Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood, who had recently emerged as the latest bestselling sensation novelists. They brought new themes to the sensation formula, most notably the introduction of the erring heroine. Wood’s East Lynne offered Lady Isabel’s adultery and imposture, while Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret depicts a wicked heroine straying into the realms of violent crime. While The Woman in White depicted male criminals preying on vulnerable women, Collins’s next novel, No Name, focused on the active and transgressive Magdalen Vanstone. Collins contributed to the new sensationalism a type of heroine who, in the words of Winifred Hughes, has ‘more intelligence and daring’ than the ‘typical female lead in Victorian literature, even at its most sensational’.¹ No Name relates Magdalen’s social and moral downfall and eventual rehabilitation. On the death of her parents, she discovers she is both illegitimate and disinherited and attempts to retrieve her lost fortune and social position by becoming first an actress and then a swindler. She adopts a false identity in order to lure her cousin, the legal inheritor of her fortune, into marriage. Her schemes entail an impersonation of her own governess and a parlour maid.