Blind Love

Synopsis

Blind Love is Wilkie Collins’s final novel. Although he did not live to complete the work, he left detailed plans for the last third of this absorbingly plotted novel which were faithfully executed by his colleague, the popular author Walter Besant. The novel is set during the Irish Land War of the early 1880s and tells the story of Iris Henley, an independent young woman who marries the “wild” Lord Harry Norland, a member of an Irish secret society, and becomes unhappily drawn into a conspiracy plot.

The novel charts the moral decline of the central male character, Lord Harry Norland.  His unstable personality veers from fervent idealism, which implicates him in a political murder, to suicidal despair; then to involvement in a sordid insurance fraud, also resulting in murder.  He is finally killed by the Fenian terrorists whose cause he had supported.  The virtuous Iris is blinded to his faults and insidiously corrupted by her love for him until she discovers the true enormity of his crime.

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