SOURCE: “Some Early Quests: Basil, Hide and Seek, and The Dead Secret,” in The Windings of the Labyrinth: Quest and Structure in the Major Novels of Wilkie Collins, Ohio University Press, 1992, pp. 13-53.

In the following excerpt, Thoms studies the thematic “quest for independence and identity” in Basil, viewing this early novel's foreshadowing of the principal issues in Collins's later fiction.

Just as Walter Hartright is startled and perplexed by the mysterious “apparition” of “a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments,” so the reader of Collins may be puzzled by the sudden appearance of The Woman in White (1860) itself. Representing such a stunning advance over its predecessor, The Dead Secret (1857), The Woman in White, like one of its titular characters, Anne Catherick, seems to have emerged from nowhere—in Hartright's words, to have “sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven” (15). Yet...