John Leech’s 1861 cartoon for Punch of a man reading from Collins’s book. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

I’ve been rereading Wilkie Collins’ ‘Woman in White’ while at the same time watching ‘The Bridge’ on SBS, and I’m struck by their similarity of structure – lots of individual events and stories, told (or centered) around different characters, all of which appear initially to have no real connection and some of which become connected, and others vanish.