SOURCE: Morris, Virginia. “Wilkie Collins: No Deliverance but in Death.” In Double Jeopardy: Women who Kill in Victorian Fiction, pp. 105-26. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

In the following essay, Morris discusses women criminals in the novels of Wilkie Collins, and asserts that Collins portrays criminal behavior among women as a revolt against domestic violence, and by presenting the women characters as intelligent, normal, and rational, rather than simple-minded, deviant, or depraved, Collins undermined traditional Victorian gender roles as well as the established, acceptable motives for murder in Victorian fiction.

Wilkie Collins, writing in the same decade and same genre as Braddon, was bolder in creating criminal women. Using sensational elements to startle and shock, he structured his work around people rather than events at the same time that he deliberately challenged the conventions of middle-class Victorian society. His women are more realistic and their motives more complex...