‘I have altered nothing’

After Walter Besant completed Wilkie Collins’s unfinished novel, Blind Love (with Collins’s authorization and elaborately detailed instructions), Besant emphatically declared that he had “altered nothing” in the final version. A comparison of the published novel with Collins’s notebook, however, reveals that Besant’s declaration was somewhat disingenuous. In addition to making several significant alternations to Collins’s original plot, the more conservative Besant incorporated both anti-Irish and anti-feminist themes, thus undercutting the more socially progressive narrative originally intended by the deceased author.