The Secret of Elizabeth is poised between Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Like The Woman in White, whose author it specifically invokes, it’s told in fragments–diaries, letters, retrospective musings–and there’s a dash of Victorian melodrama to the plot, which features psychiatric institutions and purity fanatics, and a sort of quasi-Victorian concern with sexual morality. Like Gone Girl, there’s a woman who causes trouble both when she turns up and when she disappears (we find out about events […]
‘Elizabeth X. I bet you have no other Xs in your file.’
The Secret of Elizabeth (1978) by Vera Caspary

