The third of Wilkie Collins's four great novels of the 1860s, coming after The Woman in White and No Name and immediately before The Moonstone, Armadale is quintessentially a novel of its decade. It deals with the emergence of the autonomous, sexually active woman from the dichotomies of Madonna and Magdalen; with the legal tangles of the unsatisfactory marriage laws; with the perception of the growing role of scientific intrusion into the privacy of the individual psyche. Above all, it explores the divided self, and the need to acknowledge the darker side of the personality: a modern theme grafted on to a traditional melodrama, and worked out with all Collins's skill in handling a complex and exciting plot.