"Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance."
Wilkie Collins's investigation of illegitimacy and 'the woman question' inNo Name(1862) compels with a wholly different order of suspense from that ofThe Woman in WhiteorThe Moonstone. For its family secret - the Vanstone daughters' illegitimacy, their consequent disinheritance and fall from social grace - is revealed early on, and as Magdalen Vanstone struggles to reclaim her identity, the plot uncovers many a moral, social and legal skeleton in...