This novel was written just before a turning point in Wilkie Collins career: his follow-up novel was The Woman in White, a breakthrough work for him and one of the first and best sensation novels, as well as one of the first mystery novels. It's intriguing to speculate what happened in between, because while The Dead Secret is a competent and entertaining bit of spooky storytelling, it shows little of the subsequent novel's much more complex, intriguing characterization and plotting.
But it's still a good little page-turner on the theme of how “dead secrets” are only playing dead. Collins displays his customary fascination with the law, money, sex, ambiguous identities, and physical disability. Sensation too is provided through hinky aristocratic doings on the Cornwall coast and a haunted North Wing. (In my head, the book is illustrated by Edward Gorey.)
The mysteries—of why prematurely gray-haired lady's maid Sarah Leeson departed Porthgenna Tower on the night of her mistress's death; the oaths she swore; her attachment to little Rosamond; the gravestone she visited; and the letter, the Dead Secret, she hid in the Myrtle Room—these are all easily penetrated. But as Collins explained in a preface to the third edition: "I thought it most desirable to let the effect of the story depend on expectation rather than surprise." And the interest of this novel lies not in detecting the mystery but in watching its unspooling.
After the mysterious events of the opening chapter, the story begins again some 15 years later. Rosamond Treverton has married a Mr. Frankland, recently afflicted with blindness, and the two are travelling to Porthgenna, purchased from Rosamond's father before his death, where Rosamond plans to give birth. But the child is a month early, and the two must halt along the way and engage a nurse. The only one available, it turns out, is a Mrs. Jazeph, who is hiding her previous identity. She seriously freaks out Rosamond with her strange behavior—especially the whispered injunction: "When you go to Porthgenna, keep out of the Myrtle Room!"
Of course, nothing could make Rosamond more fiercely determined to discover the Myrtle Room and search it from top to bottom. As in Collins's Poor Miss Finch, blindness becomes a moral challenge for the seeing, who can easily be tempted to hide or alter what sight would reveal, whether for the blind person's own good or for other reasons. Money, too, is a Victorian test of character, and both the Franklands are put to the test. Whether they pass their tests; whether the whole truth becomes known; whether all is set right in the end—that I leave you to guess.
by arrec