“The Woman in White” (post 3) by Wilkie Collins: Marian Holcombe, Laura’s sister and confidant, may be the third character with dissociative symptoms (but see added note re eventual, belated, medical diagnosis)

Marian, who has just overheard Laura’s husband and Count Fosco conspire against Laura, narrates (in her diary): “I recall the impulse that awakened in me to preserve those words in writing, exactly as they were spoken…while my memory vividly retained them. All this I remember plainly: there is no confusion in my head yet. The coming in here…with my pen and ink and paper, before sunrise…the ceaseless writing, faster and faster, hotter and hotter, driving on, more and more wakefully, all through the dreadful interval before the house was astir again—how clearly I recall it, from the beginning by candlelight, to the end on the page before this, in the sunshine of the new day!

Why do I sit here still?…I dare not attempt it. A fear beyond all other fears has got possession of me…Have I been sitting here asleep? I don’t know what I have been doing. 

Oh, my God! Am I going to be ill?

Ill, at such time as this! (1, pp.411-12).

[The above is followed by a note from Count Fosco:

“The illness of our excellent Miss Halcome has afforded me the opportunity of enjoying an unexpected intellectual pleasure. I refer to the perusal (which I have just completed) of this interesting Diary. There are many hundred pages here…(1, p. 413).

Comment: Marian, via her diary, has been one of this novel’s major narrators. But what she had overheard this night (a conspiracy against her sister) had frightened her into dissociative confusion, causing her to break off writing in her diary and be “ill” for some period of time, which is not immediately described.

Multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) is classified as one of the dissociative disorders, which feature problems with identity and memory, and a wide range of function, with which an author who has what I call “multiple personality trait” may be personally familiar and reflect in his characters.

Added Jan. 15: Marian is diagnosed with Typhus (1, p. 457), after her regular physician had missed it. Today, she would have been evaluated by Medicine before ever being referred to Psychiatry.

1. Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White. New York, Bantam Classic, 1860/1985