The Guilty River isn’t concerned with the supernatural, but with heredity. It is a mystery which betrays a certain fear of characteristic inheritance. Collins was not alone in this exploration. Like organic memory, heredity was a subject written about in literary and scientific circles alike, and at times the two were in direct conversation.

Thomas Hardy, whose work often betrays a preoccupation with the dark side of genetic inheritance (for an example see Jude the Obscure), exchanged letters with some of the foremost psychologists and doctors of the time. Like Hardy, Collins explores what could, and would, reemerge from ancestors past. In this sense, heredity becomes a kind of ghost story. It is the haunting, the acting of the past upon the present with unknown, and possibly fearful results.

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