The Woman in White

A young drawing master is walking along a road at night. He is surprised by the almost phantom-like appearance of a woman dressed entirely in white. She is lost and in need of assistance. He gallantly helps her, and then later is passed by men in a coach. He overhears them talking about an escaped patient from the nearby asylum--a woman in white.

So begins Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, published in 1860 and a huge success. It was the first of what were called "sensation" novels, full of melodrama and plotting, with allusions of illegitimacy, murder, and switched identities. It had elements of the Gothic novel, of the social justice of Dickens, and is a very early example of the detective novel. Though the style of prose is very ornate and is at times almost funny viewed from this day and age, it is a lot of fun. There are even two villains.

The drawing master, Walter Hartright, takes a job in the north of England for a Mr. Fairlie, who imagines himself an invalid. He has two nieces, half-sisters: Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie. Marian is plain, Laura is beautiful. Walter also notices Laura bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white, whom he learns is named Anne Catherick and was a close friend of Laura's mother.

Walter falls in love with Laura, but she is promised to Sir Percival Glyde, who would seem to be only after her money. Sir Percival, it is then revealed, had a hand in committing Anne to the asylum, and she responds by sending a letter to Laura warning her not to marry him. Sir Percival's good friend is the obese but dainty Count Fosco, an Italian who is married to Laura's aunt. A collector of canaries and white mice, he is charming but evil to those who can see through them, and together with Sir Percival they hatch a terrible plot that Walter and Marian must team together to overcome.

The novel is told entirely in first person from shifting narrators, with Walter being the most prevalent. Marian also contributes. The language is baroque and so ripe that it can engender amusement, but it also makes everything pretty clear, even when the plot becomes increasingly complicated.

The Woman in White also makes some statements about the time it was written. There is certainly an over-riding theme of the social strata of Victorian England. Walter is of the lower-class, and knows it when he steps into the Fairlies' world. Sir Percival has a secret that he must protect lest his position in society be ruined. There is also a sense of the exotic alien, in the person of Fosco. He is Italian, and thus not to be trusted, and has the kind of savoir faire that is notable among many villains who have come after him.

I also found the characterizations of Marian and Laurie to be quite dramatic and telling. Laura is beautiful and fair, and Walter falls in love with her immediately. She is vulnerable and weak, and inspires everyone around her to either protect her or exploit her. Marian, on the other hand, though smart (Fosco admires her as an adversary), is doomed to spinsterhood, even though there are several moments throughout the book in which it's plain that Walter and Marian should really be together.

Consider this initial description of Marian: "Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted--never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by a face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead...To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model...and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended--was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognize yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream."

If Collins tells us that a smart woman must therefore be homely, at least he does make Marian extraordinarily smart. There's a great scene in which she climbs out a woman in a rainstorm and eavesdrops on Sir Percival and Fosco. It's a shame that she couldn't have been better looking.

Though the book at times trips over its own language, it's quite a page-turner at the end. I made some assumptions that were not true, and was surprised by a few other developments. The story couldn't work today (I won't give anything away, but DNA would settle the central problem) but if the reader puts themselves in the world of Victoriana it rings true. As Fosco says of the story: "What a situation! I suggest it to the rising romance writers of England. I offer it, as totally new, to the worn-out dramatists of France."