The Evil Genius by Wilkie Collins

The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story was the second Wilkie Collins novel to be serialised by the Bolton Weekly Journal (following the success of Jezebel’s Daughter, 1879-1880). Appearing in weekly instalments between 26 December 1885 and 1 May 1886, it was notably syndicated across a wider range of periodicals than many of the other works of fiction appearing in the Bolton Weekly; from the relatively local publication, the Leigh Journal and Times, to as far afield as The Fife Herald and the South London Press (Troy J. Bassett, 2021).  The novel received mixed reviews, more positive than negative. There are themes of divorce and child-custody. As Jenny Bourne Taylor observes:  

“With its lurid title and theme of marital infidelity centring on the well-worn figure of the governess, this promises to be a highly strung sensation novel. Instead, the narrative progresses in a deliberately low-key way, sympathetically balancing the perspectives of the mistress and the wronged wife and showing the husband (like so many of Collins’s male figures) to be weak and vacillating rather than villainous; the ‘evil genius’ of the title is neither seductress nor mad wife nor wicked husband, but meddling mother-in-law. Yet even here there are some odd disjunctions. The lengthy Prologue describing the bleak and loveless childhood of the governess Sydney Westerfield has the making of a detective story, featuring an insurance fraud, a missing diamond, codes and ciphers, together with a brother lost in America; but these mysteries are left open-ended once the story itself begins and they are never really resolved. ” (Taylor, 2006, 81-82)