ABSTRACT
Having for a while abandoned short stories, Collins pressed on with novels. The long, woman-focussed No Name (1862) was followed by the complex Armadale (1866): illness was slowing Collins down by this time. He followed with the major mystery novel (1868) and then three somewhat more rapidly produced novels dealing with marriage and its obstacles, the long (300,000 words) Man and Wife (1870), the relatively short Poor Miss Finch, focused on a blind woman, and then the novella Miss or Mrs? (1871). He completed this powerful sequence with three novels about troubled heroines, the fairly short The New Magdalen, the female detective story The Law and the Lady (1875) and the short novel The Two Destinies (1876).
