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Poor Miss Finch (Oxford World's Classics)
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| List Price: | £8.99 |
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Average customer review:
Product Description
Wilkie Collin's intriguing story about a blind girl, Lucilla Finch, and the identical twins who both fall in love with her, has the exciting complications of his better known novels, but it also overturns conventional expectations. Using a background of myth and fairy-tale to expand the boundaries of nineteenth century realist fiction, Collins not only takes a blind person as his central character but also explores the idea of blindness and its implications. His sensitive presentation of the difficulties, disappointments, and occasional delights which follow the recovery of sight by someone blind since infancy is still one of the best accounts in fiction of a problem which continues to intrigue philosophers, psychologists, and the general public, as it has done since it was first discussed by Locke and Berkeley in the eighteenth century.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #102068 in Books
- Published on: 2008-11-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Catherine Peters edited Collins: Armdale and Hide and Seek for World's Classics.
Customer Reviews
A novel that has suffered undue neglect.
The importance of this novel has been overlooked by critics and readers for a long time but it is a great text. Written soon after 'The Moonstone' it is about a blind girl, Lucilla Finch, who falls in love with a man who - because of his epilepsy - takes medicine that causes his skin to turn blue. When she regains her sight, Lucilla mistakes her lover for his twin brother and almost marries the latter unknowingly. It contains the typical Collinsian treatment of identity as sporadic and has all the twists and cliff-hangers that his more popular novels are famous for. Having a strict purpose of presenting an accurate portrayal of blindness in fiction, though, means that Collins is much more concerned with this 'mission' rather than the rich narrative techniques we get in his earlier novels. Nevertheless, the Gothic atmosphere, the witty characterisations and some decidedly feminist ideas, make this novel a winner for me and definitely a book worthy of the Collins canon. Buy it, read it and appreciate it.
