Blind Love is Wilkie Collins’s final novel. Although he did not live to complete the work, he left detailed plans for the last third of this absorbingly plotted novel which were faithfully executed by his colleague, the popular author Walter Besant. The novel is set during the Irish Land War of the early 1880s and tells the story of Iris Henley, an independent young woman who marries the “wild” Lord Harry Norland, a member of an Irish secret society, and becomes unhappily drawn into a conspiracy plot.
The Broadview edition of Blind Love includes a critical introduction and primary source materials that address the novel’s focus on movements for Irish independence. Appendices include newspaper accounts of Ireland during the Land War and of the fraud case on which Collins based his story, articles reacting to Collins’s sudden death, Punch cartoons depicting the English attitudes toward the Irish, and contemporary reviews.
Comments
“This edition of Collins’s Blind Love offers the best of modern scholarship—it is impossible to praise it too much. Professors Bachman and Cox add considerably to Broadview’s series of reasonably-priced fine scholarly editions.” — A.D. Hutter, UCLA
Acknowledgements
- Historical Context: The Irish Question
Wilkie Collins’s Response to the Irish Question
Anglo-Saxon vs. Celt: The Imperialist Agenda
Wilkie Collins and the “Woman Question”
The Von Scheurer Fraud
Blind Love: The History and Evolution of the Text
William Wilkie Collins: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Blind Love
Appendix A: Reaction to the Death of Wilkie Collins
- “Death of Mr.Wilkie Collins,” The Times, 24 September 1889
- “The Late Mr.Wilkie Collins,” The Illustrated London News, 28 September 1889
- “Obituary.Wilkie Collins,” The Academy, 28 September 1889
Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews of Collins’s Work
- Edmund Yates, “The Works of Wilkie Collins,” Temple Bar, August 1890
- Meredith White Thompson,“Wilkie Collins,” The Spectator, 28 September 1889
- George Cotterell, “New Novels,” The Academy, 15 March 1890
- “Blind Love,” New York Tribune, 23 January 1890
- Andrew Lang, “Mr. Wilkie Collins’s Novels,” Contemporary Review, January 1890
- Harold Quilter, “In Memoriam Amici: Wilkie Collins,” The Universal Review, 5, 1889
Appendix C: Horace Pym’s Notes on the Von Scheurer Case
Appendix D: Newspaper Accounts of the Insurance Trial
- “The Scheurer Frauds,” The Times, 25 April 1888
- “France,” The Times, 26 April 1888
- “France,” The Times, 27 April 1888
Appendix E: The Prologue to “Iris,” Manuscript “C,” 1887
Appendix F: Excerpts from Collins’s Plans for Blind Love: The Synopsis
- The Cast of Characters
- The Synopsis
Appendix G: The Irish Question
- Accounts from The Times, 1882
- The Irish as Depicted in Punch, 1866, 1881, 1882
Appendix H: The Duties of the Lady’s Maid
Select Bibliography
Maria K. Bachman is Assistant Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina.
Don Richard Cox is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Both editors also co-edited Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins (University of Tennessee Press, 2003).
