Exactly how steamy is this story?
PG
Like any good Victorian novel, this book is all about hinting at sex… without showing any of the naughty stuff.
On a surface level, characters are well-behaved, repressed, and capital-P Proper. But beneath the surface there's all sorts of risqué stuff going on: premarital sex, illegitimate children, couples shacking up together, love triangles, domestic abuse, man crushes (Pesca and Walter), creepy old-man crushes (see Fosco and Marian), vaguely incestuous relationships (Marian and Laura, according to some critics), and a kinda-sorta ménage-à-trois between Walter, Marian and Laura (check out The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, and Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic for more dirt on that).
But all of that stuff is so subtly hinted at that it glides right by the censors… and over the heads of any impressionable young kiddos reading this novel.