This story about a blind girl, Lucilla Finch, and the identical twins who fall in love with her, overturns conventional expectations of nineteenth century realist fiction, through the deployment of myth and fairy-tale, and by taking a blind person as the central character Exploring the idea of blindness and its implications, Collins's presentation of the difficulties, dissappointments and occasional delights which follow the recovery of sight by someone blind since birth, is regarded as one of the best in fiction