The two destinies

the long version

One of Wilkie Collins's 'sensation' novels of two lovers who face a life of accidents and vicissitudes when they are parted cruelly as children. Unknown to each other as the children they once were, they meet again and again in their adult lives, only to be separated. Wilkie brings in in his favourite tricks - bigamy, embezzlement, desertion, disfigurement, love that cannot be undone even in the afterlife, as well as Victorian ideas of morality, fidelity and wronged women. An interesting book, if not his best.