The novel is a 19th-century semi-epistolary one. Armadale is a novel by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1864-66. Some linking passages consist of letters between the various characters, or of extracts from Lydia s journal, but the great majority of the text narrates the events as they occur. The novel has a convoluted plot about two distant cousins both named Allan Armadale. The father of one had murdered the father of the other (the two fathers are also named Allan Armadale). The distortions of the plot, the violent and irrational reactions of the characters, reflect and dramatise the ways in which his readers perceptions were distorted by the assumptions and hypocrisies of the society in which they lived, writes Catherine Peters in the comment book.It is the third of Wilkie Collins s four great novels of the 1860s: after The Woman in White (1859–60) and No Name (1862), and before The Moonstone (1868).