The battle of wits in No Name

The Woman in White is a reminder that when it comes to literature, you can’t rely on other people’s judgment or even summary of the plot, you need to read the book for yourself.  
The 1st Wilkie Collins I read was The Moonstone, which had several well-drawn female characters, from the colourful and fascinating Miss Clark, to the realistic characters such as Rosanna and Rachel, portrayed with lots of humanity and sympathy. 
When I read The Woman in White, the blurbs and reviews here and there all echoed the characters’ view that Marian Halcombe is an intelligent, independent, and resourceful woman, but everything that happened in the story proved otherwise. The different narrators may tell readers time and time again that Marian’s intelligent and admirable, but as it turns out, she’s frustratingly dim-witted—naïve, slow, not very perceptive, and extremely careless (argued here, here, and here). 
The best character in the book is neither the hero nor the heroine, but the villain—Count Fosco. The Woman in White may be accused of being melodramatic (it is, after all, a sensation novel), and Marian Halcombe’s stupidity may now and then drive you up the wall, but the book is worth reading for Count Fosco alone. 
Now I’m reading No Name. At first, having prepared for a revenge story, I expected the book to be a mind game between Magdalen and her uncle Michael Vanstone, the man who got all of her and her sister’s money. Then Wilkie Collins killed him off. So I expected it now to be between Magdalen and Noel Vanstone, Michael’s son. 
However, I’m in Scene 4 at the moment (Aldborough, Suffolk), and Magdalen, an intelligent character and feminist figure according to many reviews, turns out to be not very smart. She’s not very adept at the revenge game, too hasty to prepare herself fully and too short-tempered to keep up the act, neither experienced nor cunning enough to be convincing in her disguise. At the same time, she’s not very quick. The quick one is Mr Wragge, who notices everything and points things out for her. 
Contrary to my expectations, in Scene 4, No Name becomes a battle of wits between Magdalen’s relative, Captain (Horatio) Wragge and Mrs (Virginie) Lecount, Noel Vanstone’s domineering housekeeper. They are the ones who do the thinking and make the moves, they are the ones who guess the opponent’s next move and try to defeat each other, they are the ones who move the plot forward.  
Not only so, Wilkie Collins focuses on Mr Wragge’s and Mrs Lecount’s perspectives, keeping Magdalen’s point of view hidden from readers, and keeps Magdalen’s seduction of Noel Vanstone entirely off-stage, or if it doesn’t happen off-stage, it’s skimmed over and barely described. 
Nobody knows how Magdalen seduces Noel. I suppose, neither did Collins. 
So strange.