Wilkie Collins wrote novels of love and marriage which rigorously challenge the privileged status of marital love in both Victorian culture and modern fiction, even as he resolves sensational plots driven by deception, disguise, doubling, secrecy and criminal manipulation into the familiar conclusion of loving wedded bliss. Marriage is both a formal and a thematic concern in a Collins text: his novels explore the grey areas created by shifting social and legal expectations about love, property and the domestic sphere. His interventions range widely. Man and Wife (1870) and The Black Robe (1881) investigate whether a marriage took place legally, for example, and The Woman in White (1860) and Armadale (1866) whether it took place at all. The novel Basil (1852) includes an unconsummated marriage and an adultery plot; The Two Destinies (1876) a bigamy plot; Miss or Mrs? (1873) a clandestine marriage; and The Evil Genius (1886) adultery and divorce. The novel No Name (1862) alone features a bigamous love-match legitimised too late for the financial security of the offspring, an abortive engagement, two rather tepid marriages, and the blockbuster plot, a marriage contracted for the sole purpose of revenge.

As the example of No Name might suggest, the domestic ideal is far from the forefront in a Wilkie Collins text. His novels situate violence and intrigue at the heart of domestic life, even as they probe the legal boundaries of the marriage contract in the period that witnessed the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), the Married Women's Property Bill (1856) and the 1868 Royal Commission attempt to regularise English, Irish and Scottish marriage laws.