[3] In the Prologue, a selfish and ambitious man casts off his wife in order to marry a wealthier and better-connected woman by taking advantage of a loophole in the marriage laws of Ireland.
Geoffrey Delamayn has promised marriage to his lover Anne Silvester (governess to Lady Lundie's stepdaughter Blanche), who has incurred the enmity of her employer.
Most of the novel concerns Anne's, Geoffrey's and Arnold's attempts to clarify their marital status: In subsequent chapters Geoffrey, a keen athlete, courts Mrs Glenarm, a wealthy young widow, while Anne consults lawyers who give her conflicting advice about her position, and later tries to explain the situation to Mrs Glenarm, who rebuffs her.
Sir Patrick approaches the problem with energy, but owing to various mishaps, Geoffrey’s determination that his scheme shall succeed, and the unsatisfactory state of the law, is not immediately successful.
Anne, who strongly wishes to remove any impediment to Blanche and Arnold’s marriage, comes to the same conclusion and forces Bishopriggs to give her the letter by threatening to reveal its contents, which would make it worthless for blackmail.
Eventually Anne offers to reveal her relations with Geoffrey, even at the cost of her reputation – impressing Sir Patrick with her courageous and honourable behaviour.
Hester inadvertently reveals to Geoffrey that she murdered her brutal and rapacious husband by dismantling part of the wall of his (locked) bedroom in an almost-invisible way, leaning through and smothering him.
Apart from the marriage laws of Scotland, discussed above, Collins attacks the legal disadvantages of married women – also a mainspring of the plot of The Woman in White – and the cult of athleticism.
Page[2] points out that the last of these is not cognate with the other two, both of which were widely recognised as scandalous and were soon rectified by changes to the law, whereas athleticism and athletes appear to have been a pet hate of the diminutive and un-athletic Collins.
Among modern critics, Peters[1] holds a low opinion of its plot and characterisation, but Page[2] argues that it should be classed with Collins's acclaimed 1860s fiction rather than with his later, and inferior, polemical novels.