The Woman in White

By Wilkie Collins and Scott Brewster

With an Introduction and Notes by Scott Brewster, University of Central Lancashire.

Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery, and The Woman in White is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero, Walter Hartright, on a moonlit night in north London, encounters a solitary, terrified and beautiful woman dressed in white, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress.

The intricate plot is peopled with a finely characterised cast, from the peevish invalid Mr Fairlie to the corpulent villain Count Fosco and the enigmatic woman herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848704060

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins, hijo del paisajista William Collins, nació en Londres en 1824. Fue aprendiz en una compañía de comercio de té, estudió Derecho, hizo sus pinitos como pintor y actor, y antes de conocer a Charles Dickens en 1851, había publicado ya una biografía de su padre, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R. A. (1848), una novela histórica, Antonina (1850), y un libro de viajes, Rambles Beyond Railways (1851). Pero el encuentro con Dickens fue decisivo para la trayectoria literaria de ambos. Basil (ALBA CLÁSICA núm. VI; ALBA MÍNUS núm.) inició en 1852 una serie de novelas «sensacionales», llenas de misterio y violencia pero siempre dentro de un entorno de clase media, que, con su técnica brillante y su compleja estructura, sentaron las bases del moderno relato detectivesco y obtuvieron en seguida una gran repercusión: La dama de blanco (1860), Armadale (1862) o La Piedra Lunar (1868) fueron tan aplaudidas como imitadas. Sin nombre (1862; ALBA CLÁSICA núm. XVII; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. XI) y Marido y mujer (1870; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. XVI; ALBA MÍNUS núm.), también de este período, están escritas sin embargo con otras pautas, y sus heroínas son mujeres dramáticamente condicionadas por una arbitraria, aunque real, situación legal. En la década de 1870, Collins ensayó temas y formas nuevos: La pobre señorita Finch (1871-1872; ALBA CLÁSICA núm. XXVI; ALBA MÍNUS núm 5.) es un buen ejemplo de esta época. El novelista murió en Londres en 1889, después de una larga carrera de éxitos.

Book preview

THE WOMAN

IN WHITE

Wilkie Collins

Introduction and Notes by

Dr Scott Brewster

University of Central Lancashire

The Woman in White first published by

Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1993

Published as an ePublication 2011

ISBN 978 1 84870 406 0

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For my husband

ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

with love from your wife, the publisher

Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

not just for me but for our children,

Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

KEITH CARABINE

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

INTRODUCTION

It was a beautiful moonlight night in the summer time, and as the three friends walked along chatting gaily together, they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from the garden of a villa close at hand. It was evidently the cry of a woman in distress; and while pausing to consider what they should do, the iron gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than run in their direction, and, on coming up to the three young men, she paused for a moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on and vanished in the shadows cast upon the road. [1]

This incident is recounted in J. G. Millais’s biography of his father, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais: the three friends referred to are Millais, Wilkie Collins and his brother Charles. The account records that Wilkie Collins followed the distressed woman, who divulged to him her unhappy domestic circumstances and brutal mistreatment at the hands of a man ‘living in a villa in Regent’s Park’. We cannot be certain of the veracity of this episode, which has been treated as the source of the haunting scene early in The Woman in White where Anne Catherick confronts Walter Hartright after her escape from the asylum, but it certainly exhibits many of the central features characteristic of sensation fiction: an atmospheric mix of mystery and romance, a disturbance of the familiar, a ghostly, vulnerable and compelling woman, villainy concealed behind a respectable social façade and a puzzle that must be solved. [2]

The Woman in White (1860), along with Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), established the sensation novel as a highly successful genre in the 1860s. Rhoda Broughton, Charles Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu, Thomas Hardy, ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Charles Reade were also associated to varying degrees with sensation fiction; not all of these figures welcomed such an association, but such was the popularity and commercial impact of the term ‘sensation’ that many writers were caught in its pervasive embrace. Sensation fiction presents a full repertoire of crimes, audacious deceptions and illicit passions often lurking in the most proper households, including adultery, arson, bigamy, blackmail, fraud, murder (successful and attempted) and poisoning. In terms of narrative technique and content, some of the most immediate antecedents of the sensation novels of Collins and his contemporaries are Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram (1832), James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). A common feature of these texts is their use of first-person accounts and multiple narratives rather than omniscient narration. They are constructed from a series of reports, letters, documents, journal and diary entries, a web of stories that attempts to net and explain perplexing, frightening or estranging events. Henry James observed in 1865 that Collins’s novels deserve a more respectable name than ‘sensation’: ‘They are massive and elaborate constructions – monuments of mosaic work, for the proper mastery of which it would seem, at first, that an index and note-book were required. They are not so much works of art as works of science’ (cited in Page, pp. 123–4). This mosaic work of disparate narratives and documents produces ambiguity and uncertainty rather than a stable and comprehensive picture of reality: The Woman in White deploys multiple narrators who provide often contradictory accounts of events. The stories and documents that relate the pursuit of the ‘secret’ are gathered and arranged by Hartright, who is both an active participant in the narrative and its editor-in-chief. Thus the narrative strategy blends directness and retrospective revision, dramatic immediacy and the deft manipulation of evidence. His Preamble explains that the story

. . . will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

An editorial note indicates that only extracts from Marian’s diary directly relevant to the main narrative have been included, thus giving the impression of authenticity by presenting these passages as merely one chapter of an ongoing life. Yet instead of providing heightened verisimilitude, these first-hand accounts often make the truth seem more mutable and elusive. Each narrator, including Hartright, shows suspect judgement or outright confusion at some stage: personal experience is not to be fully trusted. With no omniscient narrator to act as ‘guide, guardian and friend’, the reader is obliged ‘to make provisional moral judgements as the narrative unfolds’ (Pykett, 1994, p. 5). The reader cannot place unquestioning trust in the objectivity of any narrator; as will be shown, she or he is on occasions invited to identify with interpreters who seem obsessive or even delusional.

Violent Stimulations: Spectacle and the Disease of Sensation

The Woman in White was sensational, not only in terms of its style and subject matter, but also in terms of its immense popularity. Initially serialised in All the Year Round (the periodical founded by Dickens after he relinquished the editorship of Household Words in 1859) between November 1859 and August 1860, it was published as a three-volume novel in 1860. The first impression sold out on the day of publication, with six further impressions appearing over the next six months, and it was also widely translated throughout Europe. Kenneth Robinson has described what now would be called the merchandising craze generated by the book:

While the novel was still selling in its thousands, manufacturers were producing Woman in White perfume, Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and the music-shops displayed Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles . . . Dickens was not alone in his enthusiasm. Thackeray sat up all night reading it. Edward Fitzgerald read it three times . . . The Prince Consort admired it greatly and sent a copy to Baron Stockmar.

Sensation fiction coincided with a period of rapid commercial expansion of the novel, fuelled by serial publication in periodicals and lending libraries such as Mudie’s. With the growth of the railway network, W. H. Smith also helped to popularise the novel by supplying inexpensive reprints for sale in station bookstalls. Henry Mansel, the Dean of St Paul’s, observed disapprovingly: ‘The public wants novels, and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season’. [pp. 495–6] Mansel regarded sensation fiction as a growing contagion:

the morbid phenomenon of literature – indications of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want which they supply.

Mansel’s was a particularly acerbic voice, but much contemporary criticism expressed suspicion about the subject matter, techniques and, implicitly, cross-class appeal of sensation fiction. In an influential article in 1862, Margaret Oliphant distinguished Collins’s ‘legitimate’ use of sen­sation from more violent and ‘hectic’ manifestations of the ‘school’: The Woman in White eschews ‘all the exaggerations of excitement’ and ‘there is almost as little that is objectionable . . . as it if had been a domestic history of the most gentle and unexciting kind’ (cited in Page, p. 113). Nevertheless, the ‘violent stimulant of serial publication’ will ‘develop the germ, and bring it to a fuller and darker bearing’. The sensation novel will fall into the hands of ‘the literary Detective’, a development that is ‘neither favourable to taste nor morals’ (cited in Page, p. 115). For Oliphant, such stimulations are both easily contrived and hard to regulate. The violent ‘stimulation’ of sensation fiction partly acknowledges the main contemporary meaning of sensation as ‘electrical stimulus’, but also evokes Freud’s sense of the uncanny as involuntary repetition. Hence the implication of nervous thrill and convulsive excitement associated with the sensation genre, both in its subject matter and popular reception. In his 1860 Preface to the first edition, Collins requested that critics and reviewers should not reveal the plot, lest they destroy ‘two main elements in the attraction of stories – the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of surprise’. This acknowledges the countervailing forces in suspense writing: the desire both to manipulate and control the reader, and yet to retain an element of shock, surprise and the unanticipated. Collins claimed to eschew contrived devices such as cliffhangers to hold readers’ attention, but as Norman Page has suggested, this can be regarded with a degree of scepticism (p. 5). Collins’s maxim, ‘Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait’, indicates that he was acutely aware of the demands of serialisation, and the formulaic, manipulative strategies inherent in sensation writing.

Other reviews were less indulgent than Oliphant’s of Collins’s narrative achievements. The Dublin University Magazine declared that, without the plot, ‘there is nothing left to examine’. [3] The Saturday Review judged Collins an ‘admirable story-teller’, but ‘not a great novelist’:

He is . . . a very ingenious constructor; but ingenious construction is not high art, just as cabinet-making and joining is not high art. Mechanical talent is what every great artist ought to possess. Mechanical talent, however, is not enough to entitle a man to rank as a great artist. When we have said that Mr Wilkie Collins succeeds in keeping up our excitement by the happy way in which he interweaves with mystery incident just sufficiently probable not to be extravagant, and that he is an adept at administering continual stimulants to our attention, we have said all. [4]

The same reviewer concludes: ‘Estimated by the standards of great novels, the Woman in White is nowhere. It certainly is not pure gold. It is not even gold with an alloy. It is an inferior metal altogether, though good and valuable of its kind’ (cited in Page, p. 86). The novel is a manufactured product able to deceive the imperceptive or unwary, but to the discerning eye an inauthentic form of art. Above all, perhaps, the sensation novel carries the scent of industry and trade. Mansel makes a more explicit link between the aesthetic quality of sensation fiction and its overt commodification: ‘A commercial atmosphere hangs around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory or the shop’ (p. 483). This evident class anxiety derived in part, as Lyn Pykett argues, from the fact that sensation fiction ‘blurred the boundaries between the classes . . . and between the respectable and the low life or demi-monde’ (1994, p. 9). Sensation fiction also blurred stylistic distinctions: ‘demotic in origin and democratic in its appeal’ (Pykett, 1992, p. 53), it drew on melodrama, the new journalism, penny dreadfuls, blending ‘high’ and ‘low’ art to create a wider audience for the novel.

Sensation fiction thrived in an age of spectacle. Technologically inno­vative public entertainments such as dioramas and panoramas, the lurid fascination of freak shows, the popularity of sensation theatre and the grandeur of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the International Exhibition of 1862 offered a widening array of sensory stimuli: excitement, emotion, thrills, shock and horror became highly commodified phenomena. In its privileging of suspense, intense emotions, excessive behaviour, extreme situations and the polarities of evil and virtue (witness a hero called Hartright), sensation fiction shared stock elements with melodrama, the predominant theatrical form in the Victorian period. [5] The dramatic potential of The Woman in White was recognised immediately: a melodramatic and unauthorised production was staged at the Surrey Theatre in November 1860, to Collins’s disgruntlement. He later wrote a stage version, first performed at the Olympic Theatre in October 1871. (In keeping with its initial success, the book’s commercial appeal continued well beyond the Victorian period: the novel was adapted for the stage several times in the twentieth century, and there have been numerous film and television versions.) [6] Melodrama gave priority to spectacle and popular entertainment, and its stage sets combined visual realism with an array of special effects. As Winifred Hughes points out, sensation fiction also combines ‘an unlimited use of suspense and coincidence with an almost scientific concern for accuracy and authenticity’, but it takes this yoking together of realism and romance to its limits: extremities of emotion and action are played out, and barely contained, within ‘normal’ domestic settings (p. 16). Although ‘sensation drama’ represents a taste for elaborate display and an appetite for villainous characters, it strongly inclines towards conventional moral closure. Whilst sensation fiction preserves the form of melodrama, it challenges this closure; its moral judgements are often ambiguous and its resolutions leave questions unanswered (p. 12). In contrast to melodrama, the family is no refuge in the sensation novel.

Sensation fiction ‘commandeered’ for a middle-class readership the generic conventions of popular cultural forms that lay outside ‘middle-class moral management’ (Pykett, 1994, p. 9). A calculated embrace of inauthenticity, a crossing of social, moral and stylistic boundaries, was integral to sensation fiction’s attraction and challenge; it could offer an unconventional perspective on the social order and moral orthodoxies of Victorian Britain. The critical distrust of sensationalism’s surface attraction is uncannily reminiscent of the way in which The Woman in White portrays Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco: they appear to be the genuine gentlemanly article, but their exterior respectability and elevated social status mask unscrupulous private behaviour, and they can deceive reliable observers. Sensation fiction directs the charge of inauthenticity, not towards popular or ‘lower’-class cultural forms, but towards aristocratic corruption and intemperance. The upper classes provide many of the villains in sensation fiction: as Anne Catherick bitterly observes, only a man without rank and title is to be trusted. Sir Percival’s name suggests ancient heraldic honour, but his improper claim to the baronetcy is the novel’s greatest crime and secret. Fosco’s ‘confession’ is prefaced by a list of pompous and unlikely titles; Madame Fosco’s biography declares her dead husband to have been a ‘martyr’ to the cause of defending aristocratic rights, but this heroism is compromised by his having spied for a foreign power (probably Austria) and thus having betrayed his previous radical principles. These reckless and roguish aristocrats are compared unfavourably to the sober, industrious Hartright; notwithstanding the fact that he comes from an artistic background, and decamps as a lovelorn adventurer to the wilds of Central America, he is able to earn a respectable professional income. He professes himself uninterested in financial gain when marrying Laura (her immediate fortune is conveniently spent), but it is his son who becomes the rightful heir to the Limmeridge estate. Hartright ruefully observes that the Law is still ‘the pre-engaged servant of the long purse’, and the legal process proves an inadequate substitute for individual action. It is with courage, transparency and patient endeavour that the middle-class hero triumphs, acquiring legal and moral legitimacy through his own efforts. As J. E. Adams remarks, ‘[i]n authorising attacks on an allegedly dissolute, profligate aristocracy for failing to live up to its inherited authority, self-restraint became a highly effective basis for claiming moral authority for the middle-classes’ (Adams, p. 128). Both ‘self-restraint’ and ‘moral authority’ must be carefully qualified here, however: the vicarous thrills of the sensation genre betray a lurid fascination with such aristocratic decadence and dissolution.

There’s No Place like Home: Sensation, Gothic and the Uncanny

The ambivalent attraction of capricious and depraved nobility returns us to an earlier moment of literary sensationalism, the late-eighteenth-century Gothic of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Clara Reeve and others. Here too a familiar world becomes estranging, horrific and inexplicable. In terms of setting, plots, tone and motifs, the classic Gothic text shares many affinities with sensation fiction, and The Woman in White in particular: gloomy, decaying castles or stately homes, aristocratic villains, vulnerable heroines, interlopers, supernatural trappings including twilit graveyards and ghostly presences, and a panoply of exorbitant passions, monstrous crimes and madness. The combination of excess, desire, crime and madness would continue through the later nineteenth century in novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In keeping with the Gothic tradition, sensation fiction revealed what Collins called ‘the secret theatre of home’ (Basil, 1852), and Henry James ascribed to Collins ‘the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’ (cited in Page, p. 122).

James’s allusion to a disturbance of the domestic by mystery and strangeness evokes a constitutive feature both of Gothic and sensation fiction: the uncanny. Freud defines the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (p. 340). By tracing how the German heimlich (‘homely’) modulates into and finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich (‘unhomely’), Freud shows how the uncanny is a matter of ambivalence, in which the domestic, intimate and comforting can become strange, secret and disturbing. Freud identifies a number of uncanny effects in literature, including the figure of the double, an unsettling of boundaries between the living and the dead, involuntary repetition, and the supernatural or occult, all of which are threaded through The Woman in White. The novel involves secrets and concealment, and it often defamiliarises domestic space; at Limmeridge, Blackwater Park and in the London lodgings shared by Hartright, Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie, there is a mixture of intimacy and estrangement, since all of these situations involve unspoken desires, deception or disguise. All three of these young characters have lost or left behind settled familial circumstances. Hartright’s encounter with the mysterious Anne Catherick, on the night prior to taking up his post as drawing master at Limmeridge, epitomises the blurring of the familiar and unfamiliar in the uncanny. The episode is ‘like a dream’, and he is ‘conscious of nothing but the confusion of my own thoughts’. Something has already ‘jarred’ in Hartright before he meets Anne, but the experience somehow confirms his foreboding about the journey to Cumberland, particularly as she intimates an attachment to Limmeridge. This moonlight meeting takes the form of a premonition, setting in train Hartright’s (and by implication, the reader’s) ‘blind unreasoning distrust of the future’. It turns a chance encounter into a perceived connection, an example of involuntary repetition which, according to Freud, ‘surrounds what would be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of chance ’ (Freud, p. 360).

Collins’s narratives emphasise various types of doubling and reversal, and the doubling of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie is structurally central to The Woman in White, since their uncanny physical resemblance conveniently permits their identities to be switched. The graveyard scene at Limmeridge, when Hartright comes face to face with the pale but animate Laura, whose tombstone inscription he has just read, mirrors his first strange encounter in the graveyard with Anne and Mrs Clements. Although legal documents pronounce her dead, Laura stands in Limmeridge graveyard as ‘living’ proof that the dead can walk again. The uncanny effects of the women’s resemblance are heightened by their barely perceptible dissimilarities. The realisation of their affinity first steals over Hartright as a disconcerting ‘sensation’: ‘The doubt which had troubled my mind for hours and hours past flashed into conviction in an instant. That something wanting was my own recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House’. Anne is the ‘something wanting’ in Laura, the ominous shadow that falls across and supplements her idealised image. Hartright’s painterly eye scrutinises physical differences between the women, but with uncanny prescience, he sees the fragility of such distinctions: ‘the idea would force itself into my mind that one sad change, in the future, was all that was wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now saw to be so imperfect in detail’. When Laura is confined in Anne’s place, the proprietor of the asylum finds perplexing but intangible differences in his ‘returned’ patient. Although Hartright feels no ‘shadow of a suspicion’ about Laura’s real identity when they are reunited, her careworn demeanour, agitated behaviour and mental confusion make her the mirror-image of Anne, who lies buried as the ‘real’ Laura: ‘the fatal resemblance which I had once seen and shuddered at seeing, in idea only, was now a real and living resemblance which asserted itself before my own eyes’. Even after Anne’s death Hartright declares to Marian: ‘My old superstition clings to me, even yet. I say again the woman in white is a living influence in our three lives’. Anne and Laura are haunting counterparts, changing places not only in legal and familial terms: both hover between life and death, visibility and invisibility. Initially Anne is mistakenly interred in the family plot, but once proven to be Laura’s half-sister, she finds a ‘proper’ place in death, and achieves her wish to lie beside Mrs Fairlie.

The doubling of Anne and Laura not only precipitates the novel’s criminal plot, it repeats the past in a deeper sense. When reflecting on how the ‘thoughtless wrong’ committed by Philip Fairlie led to the ‘heartless injury’ inflicted on both Laura and Anne Catherick, Hartright cites the biblical dictum: ‘The sins of the father shall be visited on the children’. The spectres of illegitimacy and family ‘faults’ are an echo of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764); as Fred Botting observes, ‘the oldest Gothic plot of all is re-enacted in the story of the consequences of secret paternal crime’ (p. 132). The marks of secret paternal crimes – illegitimate children and the fraudulent transmission of property – also find symbolic expression in Sir Percival Glyde’s isolated home, Blackwater Park, where genuine antiquity sits uneasily alongside modernity. Just as Sir Percival’s illegitimacy interrupts the continuity of the family title, so the house and estate have not enjoyed a measured succession of gradual changes. With its decaying Elizabethan wings, its denuded and rapidly replanted woodland, and a stagnant lake that is a metaphorical sink of corruption and literal reservoir of typhus fever, Blackwater is a ruin of decayed nobility.

There would seem to be a more positive repetition of the past when Hartright’s and Laura’s original feelings return and reawaken their time in Cumberland. Yet the strange ménage à trois enjoyed by Hartright, Laura and Marian in London and Limmeridge obliquely resembles the unconventional relationship between Collins, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd (see Biography below). Throughout the novel, stereotypical familial and gender roles are subject to reversals. In some respects, the text rehearses traditional notions of gender, from the Count’s melodramatic ‘admiration’ of Marian which prevents him from doing his worst, to Laura’s frail beauty and passivity that makes her the ‘noblest of her sex’ and Hartright’s selfless and heroic dedication. Yet the irascible Sir Percival and the outlandish Fosco do not display masculine self-control, and the enfeebled Frederick Fairlie hardly exerts patriarchal authority as master of Limmeridge: an ineffectual, irresponsible head of the family, he fittingly dies of paralysis. It is Marian Halcombe, however, who most strikingly refuses to conform to gender type.

Lyn Pykett has drawn parallels between the sensation novel and the ‘New Woman’ writing of the 1880s and 1890s. Although radically different in tone, style and perspectives on femininity, both genres constitute the novel of the modern woman, focusing on domestic or marital situations from her standpoint. In The Woman in White, female characters possess privileged knowledge, most notably the unrepentant ‘fallen’ woman Mrs Catherick; women also hold out the hope of discovering secrets. Anne is ‘shut up’ – incarcerated and silenced – but indirectly represents the key to unlock Sir Percival’s past. Marian is the text’s, and the reader’s, privileged eavesdropper, at one stage shedding her cumbersome underclothing to perch on a balcony and listen in to Sir Percival’s and Fosco’s plotting. The novel’s dialogic structure allocates her a large part of the narrative, and she has the final word. Assertive, rational, enterprising, with a ‘dear, dark, clever gipsy-face’ and tears that fall like men’s, she laments men as ‘the enemies of our innocence and our peace . . . they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel’. She later upbraids Mme Fosco for accepting such a compliant marital state, in spite of her youthful radicalism. In their first meeting at Limmeridge, Marian’s confident demeanour wins over Hartright, whilst Laura nurses a headache, the typical ‘feminine’ malady.

Yet Hartright’s attraction to Marian’s non-feminine demeanour has its limitations; the ‘rare beauty’ of her physical form has ‘unaffected grace’ and is ‘visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays’, but when she turns to Hartright he instinctively declares, ‘The lady is ugly!’ Her frank and intelligent expression is startlingly belied by a swarthy complexion and ‘a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw’. This uncanny overturning of expectation leaves Hartright with ‘a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to all of us in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream’. Marian is also portrayed as vulnerable to traditional weaknesses. She is reluctantly charmed by Fosco, who usurps her narrative when her resourcefulness at Blackwater gives way to physical and emotional distress. Later, having liberated Laura from the asylum, she assumes domestic duties whilst Hartright becomes breadwinner and chief investigator. So, whilst Marian’s characterisation challenges the restrictive ideal of Coventry Patmore’s contemporaneous ‘Angel in the House’, the novel remains ambivalent about the changing role of women inside the Victorian home. As Pykett points out, critics have tended to overestimate the ‘outspokenness’ of heroines in sensation fiction, ‘some of whom are remarkable for the power of a feeling which they are unable to articulate’ (1994, p. 7). This observation has interesting implications for The Woman in White: if muted articulation is characteristic of sensation heroines, then it applies to Anne Catherick as much as to Marian Halcombe.

Open Secrets: Interpretation and the Law

As Ronald R. Thomas remarks, ‘the terms detection and the Victorian novel increasingly became synonymous’ in the later nineteenth century (p. 169). Although The Moonstone has been deemed by T. S. Eliot ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’ (Eliot, p. 464), The Woman in White can also be regarded as detective fiction. Detection, policing and scrutiny of the private sphere were integral to Victorian culture, and sensation fiction bears this out. Alongside sensational theatre, there was another venue for dramatic spectacle during this period: the courts. The repeal of the Newspaper Stamp Tax in 1856 produced penny newspapers carrying sensationalised report of criminal trials, particularly those involving crimes of passion. As a result of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, the newly-established divorce courts also revealed domestic dramas of adultery and bigamy, such as in the Yelverton case. To paraphrase Collins, the ‘new journalism’ presented the ‘secret theatre’ of Victorian society. Sensation novels voice the unspoken in ambivalent ways, exposing and exploiting the scandalous underbelly of Victorian life, but also investigating and, to a degree, ‘treating’ these ‘crimes’.

The concern with criminality in Collins’s work had immediate fore­runners in the Newgate novel, which brought together a constellation of concerns about crime and the justice system, and manifested an often sympathetic concern with the criminal. [7] The Newgate novels derived their plots from the Newgate Calendar, a type of rogue’s gallery of colourful or notorious eighteenth-century criminals, such as the highwayman Dick Turpin; these biographies combined a romanticised interest in the rebellious outsider with stern injunctions against a life of crime. The Newgate novels also operated in a period of legal reform and a developing discourse on criminality throughout the nineteenth century, [8] acknowledged in Collins’s novel by a debate about the criminal mind in the boathouse at Blackwater Park (pp. 180–3). Charles K. Hyder has identified Maurice Méjan’s Recueil des causes célèbres (1808), a French equivalent of the Newgate Calendar, as the likeliest source for Collins’s plot (pp. 297–303). One of Méjan’s stories was based on the late-eighteenth-century case of Madame de Douhault, drugged by a relative whilst travelling to Paris and confined in the Salpêtrière lunatic asylum under a false name. She was presumed dead, leaving her brother to inherit her estate. Despite her release after two years of incarceration, and attempts to prove her identity and recover her property, Madame de Douhault died in poverty. Méjan’s account contains the main elements of Collins’s plot: abduction, concealed identities, wrongful imprisonment, presumed madness, family intrigue, lost inheritance and women’s powerlessness within a legal system where property rights predominantly resided with men. Mme de Douhault’s story had a contemporary parallel in the protracted scandal involving Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his estranged wife Rosina; the affair garnished a salacious marital saga with Rosina’s contrived confinement in an asylum, and the eventual medical acceptance of her sanity. This case was part of a more general concern in the late 1850s surrounding wrongful imprisonment in asylums, and an evolving debate about the nature of madness. [9] In these cases of mistaken identity and suspect judgement, the law and medical science faced the problem of how to interpret appearances, a problem that confronts the reader, and each narrator, at every turn in The Woman in White.

Collins’s Preface to the 1861 edition, which acknowledges ‘technical’ errors in the novel’s chronology first detected by a Times review in October 1860, nonetheless rejects the allegation of legal inaccuracies by invoking his legal training and experienced professional advice. In East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret, a lawyer becomes the professional hero; in Collins’s novel, Hartright operates in quasi-legal manner, compiling documentary rather than ‘hearsay’ evidence and tracking Sir Percival and Fosco within the bounds of the law. The only time he lapses into extra-judicial action, scuffling with Sir Percival’s henchmen in Welmingham, he must submit to the due process of law, even on a trumped-up charge. Hartright’s ‘case’ is recorded ‘in the words of the brief, plain, studiously simple abstract which I committed to writing for my own guidance, and for the guidance of my legal adviser. So the tangled web will be most speedily and most intelligibly unrolled’. Yet, as the family lawyer Gilmore remarks, the Law can ‘dispute any human statement, made under any circumstances, and reduced to any form’. The law itself is a tangled web, in which it is difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality. In the face of mystery and deception, where the nature of the secret alters as the investigation proceeds, Hartright and Marian must read between the lines. As he begins to unravel Sir Percival’s secrets, Hartright reflects on how to look for answers obliquely: ‘Was it possible that appearances in this case had pointed one way while the truth lay all the while unsuspected in another direction?’. For all their faith in evidence and stress on accuracy, Hartright and Marian cannot succeed by appealing to self-evident facts:

It was strange to look back and to see, now, that the poverty which had denied us all hope of assistance had been the indirect means of our success, by forcing me to act for myself. If we had been rich enough to find legal help, what would have been the result? The gain . . . would have been more than doubtful – the loss, judging by the plain test of events as they had really happened, certain.

To submit to the law’s ‘plain test of events’ would not have exposed the conspiracy. To unroll a tangled web of hidden motives, deceptive surfaces and buried secrets, to navigate misleading labyrinths, the skilled interpreter must piece together a mosaic of clues through association and inference; if, as James suggests, this detection is a work of science, it is a science of suspicion that places ‘plain sense’ and ‘the studiously simple’ fundamentally in question.

A Monument of Mosaic Work

Jenny Bourne Taylor comments that The Woman in White revolves around ‘the problem of how to know and how to interpret’ (p. 11): the novel exhibits that blend of verisimilitude and uncertainty noted by Winifred Hughes. The collation of evidence – and the futures of Hartright, Marian and Laura – relies to a large extent upon diary and journal entries, where fact intermingles with subjective opinion and fallible memory. Official documents, such as death certificates, tombstones, marriage registers and papers of confinement, are shown to be untrustworthy or misleading. The participants’ testimonies provide eyewitness ‘authenticity’ but they are interested parties, whose perspective on the ‘case’ is limited and partial. In trying to establish the chronological sequence of events upon which the exposure of the fraud depends, no witness can securely provide proof until Fosco’s confession, and even that is a grandiloquent narrative performance. Mrs Michelson, ‘taught to place the claims of truth above all other considerations’ and who declares, ‘I advance no opinions – I offer facts only’, cannot be sure of crucial dates and is disarmed by Fosco, just as Sir Percival initially beguiles the dispassionate Gilmore. Laura’s tendency to lapse into ‘unconscious contradiction’, where imagined and remembered events blur together, makes her evidence suspect. Yet Laura’s fragile mental state, which can only render up an account of the conspiracy that is ‘presented in fragments, sadly incoherent in themselves, and widely detached from each other’, exemplifies the difficulties faced by interpreters throughout the novel. Deceptive appearances permit crimes to take place, and the text’s crimes – Sir Percival’s forgery of his parents’ marriage and the nefarious swapping of identities – correspondingly involve the ability to manipulate appearances. To detect crime on the basis of such unreliable evidence becomes highly problematic.

In the novel, reading and interpretation threaten to transmute into a form of compulsion or delusion, where coincidences become willed associations. When Hartright begins to connect Anne Catherick, Laura and Sir Percival, he wonders if he is ‘at the mercy of any delusion which common chances and common coincidences might suggest to my imagination . . . The foreboding of some undiscoverable danger lying hid from us all in the darkness of the future was strong on me’. Anne’s anonymous letter, denouncing Sir Percival and warning Laura about her impending marriage, suggests a secret idea to Hartright:

I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence.

The subsequent investigation depends upon such monomania; when Hartright later remarks that ‘[i]t was perfectly in character with Anne’s mental affliction that she should assume an absolute knowledge of the secret on no better grounds than vague suspicion’, he is also characterising his own affliction, the compulsive desire to uncover secrets. Hartright’s ‘prejudices’ infect Marian, who in turn passes on the infection to Gilmore. Suspicion becomes contagious, an uncanny counterpart of Anne Catherick’s morbid fixation. The illness that ends Marian’s investigations at Blackwater is diagnosed as typhus, but her fever could equally result from a surfeit of knowledge, impelling her ‘ceaseless writing, faster and faster, hotter and hotter’. The infectious desire to discover is the ailment that Mr Fairlie fears most, but despite his anxious wish not to know, even he is called upon to render up an account of events. When Hartright asks Limmeridge’s tenants to accept the proof of Laura’s identity, the ‘effect of the question was electrical’: it provokes an impromptu outburst of cheers and weeping. This response recalls the ‘electrical’ stimulation of sensation. Far from the dispassionate assessment of the courtroom, the presentation of evidence here involves the power of suggestion. To ask a question induces the disease of sensation; to examine the nature of truth has an enervating effect on others. Hartright’s suggestive power is strangely akin to Fosco’s mesmeric presence, particularly ‘the extraordinary power of his eyes’ and his uncanny ability to pry into minds. It is often implied that Fosco can foreread the intentions of the investigators; here, momentarily, Hartright emulates the Count’s hypnotic capacity to discern and exploit the secrets of the mind.

The Woman in White, like all sensation novels, is primarily a ‘novel with a secret’, and the pleasures of unravelling mysteries and stripping away disguises in sensation fiction often lead to further concealments. Hartright and Marian initially misinterpret Anne’s mystery (she is not Sir Percival’s daughter) and the ‘real’ secret (Sir Percival’s illegitimacy) leads to the further revelation that Philip Fairlie is the father of both Anne and Laura. Anne embodies the nature of secrecy in the narrative because she is constantly misread: everyone believes that she has the potential to expose Sir Percival, yet she does not actually know his secret. All of the main characters must live with deception and disguise in the narrative, concealing themselves under assumed identities or leading double lives. In a text where most characters ‘forge’ an identity in a double sense, the form of Anne’s irrationality once more seems intimately familiar: ‘Insane people were often at one time, outwardly as well as inwardly, unlike what they were at another – the change from better to worse, or from worse to better, in the madness, having a necessary tendency to produce alterations of appearance externally’. In the severest justice, Sir Percival’s secret literally dies with him, when he is trapped by the ‘perverse’ lock on the vestry door in Old Welmingham church. Fosco’s deceptions have equally deadly con­sequences: the grim retribution exacted by the Brotherhood is the result of another part of the Count’s life, largely unknown to Hartright. Even Pesca, whose recognition of the Count signs his death warrant, is neither fully aware of Fosco’s betrayals nor privy to his assassination. Like the other characters, Pesca knows something but is not fully ‘in the know’.

The complex intersection of mystery, the uncanny, the family, gender, crime and secrecy in Collins’s novel takes us back to the troubling, enigmatic figure who sets the narrative in motion and who lies at the heart of this intersection in the novel: Anne Catherick. In one sense she is the pathetic outsider; in another, she is the typical Victorian woman as portrayed in the sensation novel, subject to but evading debilitating classifications, emerging from the shadows and various forms of con­finement or restriction. The ghostly outsider, whose shadow haunts the novel and who glides between Walter Hartright and the page, is not just a victim but an active interpreter, one who asks questions that cannot be readily answered. In this, Anne is as much the counterpart of Marian Halcombe as she is of Laura Fairlie/ Glyde/ Hartright: the woman in white occupies the leading role in Collins’s secret theatre of the Victorian home.

Biography

William Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was the elder son of the landscape painter William Collins, and he was named after his godfather, the painter David Wilkie. He received little formal education, and worked briefly as a tea importer, then took up art, exhibiting a painting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1851; he was also called to the bar, but never practised as barrister. His first book was a biography of his father, and he contributed a number of stories and articles to Household Words, then edited by Charles Dickens. Collins also contributed to All the Year Round, established by Dickens in 1859. Collins and Dickens became close friends, touring Britain and the United States together and collaborating on several stories. Collins’s novels include Armadale (1866) and No Name (1862), but apart from The Woman in White he is best known for The Moonstone (1868), generally regarded as the first modern detective novel (it also is published in Wordsworth Classics). Collins never married, but he lived for many years with Caroline Graves, and he also had three children with Martha Rudd. Collins suffered from prolonged ill-health, particularly gout, and became addicted to laudanum. He died in Wimpole Street in September 1889.

Dr Scott Brewster

University of Central Lancashire

NOTES

1 J. G. Millais, pp. 278–9. For full details of this and other references, please turn to the Bibliography at the end of this Introduction. Whenever possible, the surname and page number will follow in parentheses after the quotation in the main text.

2 Charles Collins’s wife, Kate Dickens, reputedly believed the woman in white to be Caroline Graves, with whom Wilkie Collins lived for many years.

3 Unsigned review, Dublin University Magazine, February 1861, lviii, pp. 200–3, cited in Page, p. 105

4 Unsigned review, Saturday Review, 25 August 1860, x, pp. 249–50, cited in Page, p. 84.

5 On the stock elements of melodrama, see Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

6 See Sweet’s useful appendices, pp. 628–44.

7 The Newgate genre acquired its name from a particularly brutal London prison that held many political radicals in the late eighteenth century, and which became a focus for protest against a repressive legal and political system. Newgate novels such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram (1832) and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) influenced Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Barnaby Rudge (1841).

8 See Thomas, pp. 175–6.

9 See Altick and also Scull, MacKenzie and Hervey. On the possible impact of some of the criminal trials on Collins’s work, see Sutherland, 1996. Collins dedicated the novel to Bryan Waller Procter, a lawyer, poet and doctor, who was appointed in 1832 as a metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy, with responsibilities for inspecting asylums.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. E. Adams, ‘Victorian Sexualities’, in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker, Blackwell, Oxford 1999

Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel, Ohio University Press, Columbus, Ohio 1991

Robert Ashley, Wilkie Collins, Barker, London 1952

Fred Botting, Gothic, Routledge, London and New York 1996

Patrick Bratlinger, ‘What is Sensational about the Sensation Novel?’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 37, 1982, pp. 1–28

Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut 1976

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism, Rutgers University Press, Rutgers, New Jersey 1993

Deirdre David (ed.), The Victorian Novel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001

Nuell Pharr Davis, The Life of Wilkie Collins, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois 1956

T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 2nd edn, Faber and Faber, London 1934

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14: Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1985

Patricia Frick, ‘The Fallen Angels of Wilkie Collins’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 7/4, 1984, pp. 343–51

Andrew Gasson, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. and London 1992

Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1963

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1980

Charles K. Hyder, ‘Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 54, 1939, pp. 297–303

Henry James, unsigned review, ‘Miss Braddon’, Nation 9, November 1865, i, pp. 593–5, cited in Page, pp. 122–4

Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Victorian Culture, Macmillan, Basingstoke 1999

Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction, Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, AMS Press, New York 1982

Henry Mansel, Quarterly Review, Vol. 113, April 1863, pp. 481–514

J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais, Methuen, London 1899

Alison Millbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction, Macmillan, London 1992

Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995

Lillian Nayder, Wilkie Collins, Twayne, Boston 1997

Margaret Oliphant, unsigned review, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1862, xci, pp. 565–74, cited in Page, pp. 110–21

Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1974

David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Vol 1: The Gothic Tradition, 2nd edn, Longman, London 1996

Lyn Pykett, The Improper Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, Routledge, London and New York 1992

Lyn Pykett, The Sensation Novel: From ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’, Northcote House, Plymouth 1994

Lyn Pykett (ed.), New Casebooks: Wilkie Collins, Contemporary Critical Essays, Macmillan, London 1998

Lyn Pykett, ‘Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel’, in The Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, pp. 192–211

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, Macmillan, London 1991

Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography, Davis-Poynter, London 1951, reprinted 1974

Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1996

Nelson Smith and R. C. Terry (eds), Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments, AMS Press, New York 1995

Matthew Sweet (ed.), The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1999

Harvey Peter Sucksmith (ed.), The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1973

John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, Macmillan, London 1995

John Sutherland (ed.), The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996

Julian Symons (ed.), The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1974

Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Psychology, Routledge, London 1988

Ronald R. Thomas, ‘Detection in the Victorian Novel’, in The Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, pp. 169–91

Herbert F. Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, Blackwell, Oxford 1999

Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890, Longman, London 1985

PREFACE TO THE 1860 EDITION

An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book. They are all placed in different positions along the chain of events; and they all take the chain up in turn, and carry it on to the end.

If the execution of this idea had led to nothing more than the attainment of mere novelty of form, I should not have claimed a moment’s attention for it in this place. But the substance of the book, as well as the form, has profited by it. It has forced me to keep the story constantly moving forward; and it has afforded my characters a new opportunity of expressing themselves, through the medium of the written contributions which they are supposed to make to the progress of the narrative.

In writing these prefatory lines, I cannot prevail on myself to pass over in silence the warm welcome which my story has met with, in its periodical form, among English and American readers. In the first place, that welcome has, I hope, justified me for having accepted the serious literary responsi­bility of appearing in the columns of All the Year Round, immediately after Mr Charles Dickens had occupied them with the most perfect work of constructive art that has ever proceeded from his pen. In the second place, by frankly acknowledging the recognition that I have obtained thus far, I provide for myself an opportunity of thanking many correspondents (to whom I am personally unknown) for the hearty encouragement I received from them while my work was in progress. Now, while the visionary men and women, among whom I have been living so long, are all leaving me, I remember very gratefully that ‘Marian’ and ‘Laura’ made such warm friends in many quarters, that I was peremptorily cautioned at a serious crisis in the story, to be careful how I treated them – that Mr Fairlie found sympathetic fellow-sufferers, who remonstrated with me for not making Christian allowance for the state of his nerves ­– that Sir Percival’s ‘secret’ became sufficiently exasperating, in course of time, to be made the subject of bets (all of which I hereby declare to be ‘off’) – and that Count Fosco suggested metaphysical consider­ations to the learned in such matters (which I don’t quite understand to this day), besides provoking numerous inquiries as to the living model, from which he had been really taken. I can only answer these last by confessing that many models, some living and some dead, have ‘sat’ for him; and by hinting that the Count would not have been as true to nature as I have tried to make him, if the range of my search for materials had not extended, in his case as well as in others, beyond the narrow human limit which is represented by one man.

In presenting my book to a new class of readers, in its complete form, I have only to say that it has been carefully revised; and that the divisions of the chapters, and other minor matters of the same sort, have been altered here and there, with a view to smoothing and consolidating the story in its course through these volumes. If the readers who have waited until it was done, only prove to be as kind an audience as the readers who followed it through its weekly progress, The Woman in White will be the most precious impersonal Woman on the list of my acquaintance.

Before I conclude, I am desirous of addressing one or two questions, of the most harmless and innocent kind, to the Critics.

In the event of this book being reviewed, I venture to ask whether it is possible to praise the writer, or to blame him, without opening the proceedings by telling his story at second-hand? As that story is written by me – with the inevitable suppressions which the periodical system of publication forces on the novelist – the telling it fills more than a thousand closely printed pages. No small portion of this space is occupied by hundreds of little ‘connecting links’, of trifling value in themselves, but of the utmost importance in maintaining the smooth­ness, the reality, and the probability of the entire narrative. If the critic tells the story with these, can he do it in his allotted page, or column, as the case may be? If he tells it without these, is he doing a fellow-labourer in another form of Art, the justice which writers owe to one another? And lastly, if he tells it at all, in any way whatever, is he doing a service to the reader, by destroying, beforehand, two main elements of the attraction of all stories – the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of surprise?

Harley Street, London

August 3, 1860

PREFACE TO THE 1861 EDITION

The Woman in White has been received with such marked favour by a very large circle of readers, that this volume scarcely stands in need of any prefatory introduction on my part. All that it is necessary for me to say on the subject of the present edition –- the first issued in a portable and popular form – may be summed up in few words.

I have endeavoured, by careful correction and revision, to make my story as worthy as I could of a continuance of the public approval. Certain technical errors which had escaped me while I was writing the book are here rectified. None of these little blemishes in the slightest degree interfered with the interest of the narrative – but it was as well to remove them at the first opportunity, out of respect to my readers; and in this edition, accordingly, they exist no more.

Some doubt having been expressed, in certain captious quarters, about the correct presentation of the legal ‘points’ incidental to the story, I may be permitted to mention that I spared no pains – in this instance, as in all others – to preserve myself from unintentionally misleading my readers. A solicitor of great experience in his profession most kindly and carefully guided my steps, whenever the course of the narrative led me into the labyrinth of the Law. Every doubtful question was submitted to this gentleman, before I ventured on putting pen to paper; and all the proof-sheets which referred to legal matters were corrected by his hand before the story was published. I can add, on high judicial authority, that these precautions were not taken in vain. The ‘law’ in this book has been discussed, since its publication, by more than one competent tribunal, and has been decided to be sound.

One word more, before I conclude, in acknowledgment of the heavy debt of gratitude which I owe to the reading public.

It is no affectation on my part to say that the success of this book has been especially welcome to me, because it implied the recognition of a literary principle which has guided me since I first addressed my readers in the character of a novelist.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character – for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events them­selves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women – for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves.

The reception accorded to The Woman in White has practically confirmed these opinions, and has satisfied me that I may trust to them in the future. Here is a novel which has met with a very kind reception, because it is a story; and here is a story, the interest of which – as I know by the testimony, voluntarily addressed to me, of the readers themselves – is never disconnected from the interest of character. ‘Laura’, ‘Miss Halcombe’ and ‘Anne Catherick’; ‘Count Fosco’, ‘Mr Fairlie’ and ‘Walter Hartright’; have made friends for me wherever they have made themselves known. I hope the time is not far distant when I may meet those friends again, and when I may try, through the medium of new characters, to awaken their interest in another story.

Harley Street, London

February, 1861

PREAMBLE

This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.

If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.

But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will be the narrator. When not, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them.

Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first.

THE FIRST EPOCH

The Story Begun by Sir Walter Hartright

(of Clement’s Inn, [1] Teacher of Drawing)

1

It was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the autumn breezes on the sea-shore.

For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well. During the past year I had not managed my professional resources as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of spending the autumn economically between my mother’s cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers in town.

The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun. I roused myself

Reviews for The Woman in White

[kristykay22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's easy to think that cultural sensations like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter are unique to 21st century life, but The Woman in White, a serialized Victorian novel published in 1860 was just as much of a cultural phenomenon in its day. And I'm here to tell you that it holds up! This story of greed, chance, look-alikes, madness, forgery, complicated British inheritance laws, thwarted love, murder, and a couple of truly amazingly drawn Italians (one good, one so wonderfully bad) is just as much of a page turner 160 years after its publication. Collins tells his story as a kind of a legal disposition with characters stepping into to tell their memories or share their diary entries surrounding the tragic and compelling story of Anne Catherick, the woman in white herself, and Laura Fairlie, a wealthy and innocent young woman who bears a strong resemblance to Anne. This technique helps highlight Collins' knack for creating characters with unique voices, while also letting certain unreliable narrators be as unreliable as they want without an omniscient narrator stepping in to straighten things out. It's hard to do any justice to the plot of this 500+ page novel in (and to avoid any spoilers) in a summary, so I'll just encourage anyone with a love for Victorian sensationalism to dig in. My only real criticism is that the book loses some of its drive as we reach the conclusion: in part this is a natural side effect of needing to tie up all the loose ends, but it is also a result of losing the amazing voice of Marian Halcome, Laura's devoted half-sister, in the third volume of the book. More Marian and more Fosco!

[jonimfisher · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This epic tale of women abused by society because they had no legal rights is the story that led to changes in British law. This story awakened the women's rights movement in England.

[jackmassa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My rating of this classic Victorian mystery novel varied as I slogged through it. The first 50 pages seemed excruciatingly slow and mawkishly written, even by Victorian standards. But my interest revved up as the story proceeded and most of the way I was eagerly turning the pages, extremely engaged and empathizing with the characters, especially the "most interesting" Miss Halcombe (I confess a profound weakness for intelligent and selfless women.)

The last fifth of the novel seem anticlimactic though, with a deus ex machina plot solution that seemed an overgenerous gift of the storyteller to his beleaguered characters.

On page 400 or so I probably would have given this 4 or even 5 stars, but because of these weaknesses, on sum I give it 3.

[tess_schoolmarm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a Victorian "mystery" told by multiple narrators. It is a great read, albeit long. 1005 pages

[nmorrissey-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Good old-fashioned story-telling at its best! Though the British insistence on class distinctions and the characterization of women are often maddening, the strong narrative and compelling mystery at the center of this novel easily overcome these annoyances. Collins had a wide-ranging influence on his contemporary authors, and his work deserves to be more widely read today.

[danielstj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a surprisingly engaging novel. I did not think, due to the style, that I would enjoy it at first-- but I was proven wrong time and time again. There is much to like here and much to learn. Collins is a skillful writer that carries you along the story-line like helping someone cross the street. The plot is always engaging and that is rarely, if at all, a moment wasted in the expanse of the plot-line. The characters are flawed, but likeable. The setting is pivotal and not overwrought by any effusions of "purple prose." All in all, this was a great book and it will not be my last selection from Collins-- who I had never heard of previous to picking this up at random from my local college library. A big thumbs up. Well done, Mr. Collins.

[john_warner-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Shortly before reporting to Limmeridge House in northern England where he has been employed as a drawing master, Hartright is on one of his frequent walks throughout London neighborhoods. He encounters a mysterious woman dressed in white who seeks his assistance with directions. After the two depart, he learns shortly from the police that the woman has recently escaped from an asylum. Later, when he reports to Limmeridge House, he discovers that one of his students, Laura Fairlie, the manor's master, bears a close resemblance to the woman in white. The young artist quickly falls in love with Laura only to be told by Laura's devoted half-sister, Marian Halcombe, that she is betrothed to the baronet, Sir Percival Glyde. Wishing not to disturb the future marriage, Hartright terminates his position.This novel, published in 1859, is considered one of the earliest mystery novels. Generally, when I read a classic, the literary styling and language is so cumbersome that I rarely rate it higher than three stars. Not only did I find the language easy to understand, but I found the story very engaging. Much of the first half of the novel was setting the stage for the second half, which seemed typical for many 19th century classics; however, once the suspense began, my attention was held page by page until a satisfactory ending.

[andrew1theqm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an enjoyable read and would have most probably have got a better rating if it wasn't for how long winded it was.

[lisahistory · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Eerie but not frightening, wonderfully paced plot, characters you like and understand.

[bodagirl · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

An excellent example of why authors shouldn't be paid for the amount of words they write. There were multiple times when I wanted to stop, but there were the reading challenges and a few plot points were actually interesting. I can forgive the overly dramatic intrigue that makes no sense, why didn't they just kill Laura and shut up Anne in the asylum, where she would have died anyway, but my biggest issue with the book is Walter falling for dumb, stupid, no-personality,perfect-Victorian-angel Laura while clearly the better woman is Marian, who is smart, is driven, and has crazy amounts of agency including the fact that risks her life to eavesdrop on Sir Percival and the count to save her sister. Men, gah!

[philsyphe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I learned that “The Woman in White” was one of the three best-selling sensation novels on the nineteenth century I naturally had high hopes. Having read one of the other two best sellers – M. E. Braddon’s “Lady Audley’s Secret” – and thoroughly enjoyed it, I expected “The Woman in White” to at least equal Ms Braddon’s brilliance.Alas! It did not come up to scratch, though that’s not to say it wasn’t any good. Just didn’t meet my expectations. I found it too rambling at times, as though it’s long for the sake of being long.

[antao-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 1981-01-25)Beauty is completely subjective, and in Victorian times when this novel was written, the ideal of beauty was extremely different to what we would consider attractive now. Blond, blue eyed, curly hair and very pale was considered lovely. Women went to incredible lengths to achieve the paleness - even deliberately trying to catch consumption or tapeworms as that would help achieve the extreme paleness, weakness and general lying on the sofa because you are too pathetic to do anything else look. This is not a general look that is found attractive nowadays. Then, just simply having dark hair / eyes was enough to be considered 'ugly'. And then, Marion’s sheer physical energy and liveliness would have been found unappealing and a bit disgusting (I seem to remember from the book that she favoured 'natural dress', eschewing all the corseting necessary to achieve the Victorian shape), whereas today that is much more in line with what we find attractive.In my opinion, Rosanna's interest is twofold: on the one side her character provides the melodramatic ingredient essential to any typical sensation novel, which is the genre that constituted Collins's main audience; on the other, the secrecy of her behaviour allows The Moonstone to linger for a couple of hundred pages more than it normally would on a modern narrative. Besides a myriad of details concerning the full gallery of personages in the novel, The Moonstone's inordinate (for a thriller) page-count relies on two main facts:a) Rachel's refusal to recount the fateful night's chain of events;b) Rosana's intriguing responses and sudden disappearance (not to hurt @Palfreyman's 'Spoiler Alert' proclivities).Without Rosanna Spearman The Moonstone would be a much shorter novel; but it's all due to Collins's talent that he could make so much with so little. Rosanna Spearman is indeed a very interestig character. Her real origins are covered in mystery but Collins drops some hints as to her possible genteel upbringing despite her former career as a thief and sojourn in the reformatory school. One of the other characters (I forget whom) notices her demeanour as that of a lady's, and then there's the famous letter. That someone with her bas-fonds criminal record writes so well can only mean she had a fairly good education. On the other hand, a letter as long as hers functions as a device for the author to enrich a whole installment of the serial while keeping the readers' curiosity in check. She can't confide in anyone and people don't really know what she's up to. She's also given quite a lot of license, even understanding, allowing her to be on her own. She is intriguing though. Surprised no one's been along to write her back story in same way as some of the Bronte's characters have had their stories told by later writers....Collins's social awareness is still at its most embrionary level in “The Moonstone”, at least in what concerns Rosanna Spearman. We know almost nothing about her, and I believe that was the author's express intention, so as to spread a cloud of mystery over the conditions of her birth and upbringing; the reader can only speculate about Rosanna's identity. It's easy to feel a certain empathy towards the character because of the misery she appears to exude, but let's not forget she seems well treated in the Verinder household, benefits from Betteredge's leniency and her mistress's protection. The fact that she's not popular among the rest of the staff has nothing to do with her origins or situation in life. To be honest there's not much with which to weave a social case out of her; unhappiness and unrequited love are not themes limited to class discrepancies and I really feel Collins's purpose was to make a sentimental point not a social one.

[murderbydeath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was laborious. There were moments when I would have believed the damn thing was continuing to add pages to itself as I read it. The book switches POVs throughout, and that helps - I can't imagine it told from a single POV - but I still struggled to pick it back up. I found the characters in the first epoch exasperating; Walter Hartwright was just so hopelessly romantic. And by romantic I mean a melodramatic Byron wannabe. Laura, the character the whole story revolves around, actually left very little impression on me at all, and her sister Marion, of whom I expected strong, rational sense from, let me down when the story's POV switched to hers. The second epoch was the worst for me though. Marion becomes more the character I expected her to be and I really liked her, and Hartwright was thankfully absent, but the second epoch was all about winding up the tension; subtle, brilliantly done foreshadowing and a slow build up to the inevitable Terrible Event. Most people relish this part of the story – that sense of dread anticipation. I am not most people. The second epoch nearly killed me: I could recognise the brilliance of the writing and story telling but at the same time, just get it over with already! I had prepared myself for Percival being a nasty piece of work; the more obsequious he became in the first epoch, the more obvious it was to me that he was going to be an ass. Fosco though, Fosco was truly the villain in this tale. The more he smiled and sided with the women, the diabolical he became. This was the part I had to make myself read. The third and final epoch was for me the best one because now things were getting done. The climax of the story, the biggest plot twist (which I did guess before it was revealed) is over with and the third epoch is about fixing things; making the villains pay by searching out and revealing their secrets. Hartwright's time away did him good and he's not nearly the twit he was in the first epoch; he becomes a believable hero. Laura just got on my nerves; her special snowflake status from the start makes it hard to properly sympathise with her for her truly horrible experiences in epoch two. Percival's comeuppance was all about the chase; lots of action, and a secret that when revealed didn't sound like it was worth all his efforts at concealment until the author makes us aware that at the time it was a capital crime. His final confrontation was excellent though; I didn't see that coming. But Fosco, Fosco is revealed to be the true threat, the real evil genius. If Doyle's Moriarty wasn't strongly influenced by Collins' Fosco I'll eat my socks. At the same time, I got the strong sense that Collins had the most fun in creating Fosco; I'd dearly love to know how much of himself he put into his mad creation. Fosco's character was just so different in every way to all the others that by the end it felt like the rest of the story was created merely to give Fosco reason for existing. Both final acts failed to surprise me: too much attention was made of the scarred man for him to be background, and no way could any author from this time period walk away from a fortune and a title, even on behalf of their characters. but it was a satisfying ending nonetheless. A brilliant read that I'd recommend to anyone interested in a good story. So many of the tropes and plot devices used today came from authors like Collins and it's worth reading if only to see them done by a master. But it's definitely not a quick read.

[carol420 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Walter Hartright first meets this mysterious woman while walking along a deserted road; she was a solitary, unusual woman who is dressed from head to foot in white garments. He talks with her and then she disappears. In this way the "Woman in White" begins. It is a fascinating mystery novel full of twists and turns, mistaken identities, and surprise revelations. I loved this book and the investigating that Walter Hartright does, after his first encounter with the woman in white, to uncover her identity. This book was a bit dated in parts, but overall a strange, eerie mystery tale that is well worth reading. It deserves 3 1/2 stars.

[jennannej_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Finally finished this fatty book! It reminded me a bit of Dracula. It was written through the narratives and letters and diaries of various characters and is slow moving..very much like Dracula. It was a bit interesting, but could have moved faster. But I think that's just the way things were written back then.

[adilinaria · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Finally. That took me months to read, not because I didn't enjoy it but just everything else that got in the way. I tried it on audio, it didn't stick so I set it down forever. Then I switched to kindle and got insanely busy. Finally got it finished though. It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it. I'll definitely be reading more Wilkie Collins in the future, but it may be just a little bit before I get to them.

[ant.harrison · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So much has already been written about this classic of English literature, that I am unable to add anything new or original. All I will say is that this is one of the most gripping and absorbing 'mystery' stories you are ever likely go read; not for nothing has Collins been credited with inventing the modern detective story (or crime fiction, to give it its contemporary title). Set in 19th century London, Collins weaves a complex and intricate story that despite its age remains as fresh and gripping as ever.
© Koplowitz 2009

[fluffyblue_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fairly slow paced mystery, which I did enjoy reading the majority of the time, but found some of the book dull. It can be a bit descriptive - bordering on verbose - at times, but the actual plot is quite intriguing.

[donnab317 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A typical Victorian novel's prose (and what rediculous comments on the passive, ineffective nature of women), but what a story! I realy got into all the twists and turns of the plot. Quite suspensful and well crafted. Collins was a master and I can see why the Victorians were as fond of him as of Dickens.

[sweetbriarpoet · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm a fast reader. I usually love everything, but this book took me FOREVER to read. Marian and Fosco were the only interesting characters of the bunch. And, listen, I guessed the mystery before the first section was over. I guess I just want to leave the mysteries to Sherlock Holmes.

[tlhelen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a story of two half-sisters who are switched, one of them falling in love with the protagonist.A very confusing storyline. Definitely a thriller. Quirky characters.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Woman in White was published in 1860 and is one of the first mystery novels. It's told by a variety of narrators according to who was actually involved in whatever part of the story. As is to be expected, some of them know more than others, and some are more reliable than others.The story centers around Laura Fairlie and her half-sister, Marian Halcombe. The first narrator, Walter Hartwright, is hired as their drawing master and in short order falls in love with the beautiful Laura. Alas, she is betrothed to another, the suspicious Sir Percival. Originally, the suspicions about Sir Percival come from the title woman, who Walter meets along a lonely road. It turns out that she had escaped from an asylum, but she insists she doesn't belong there.Of course, there are many twists and turns and connections and theories to be investigated when things all start going terribly wrong. The story being told by various people means the reader goes along for the ride, sometimes guessing where the path will lead, sometimes being led astray. I found it generally quite entertaining, although I found the last couple of sections the most difficult to get through. I guess that's just the nature of the beast - the fun is in the chase, not in the wrapping up.

[jerhogan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book once it got going. The situation seems so dark it is really interesting to find out how the author resolves it. On one level the ending seems a bit too pat but I can see how hard it would be to give Walter an active role in the demise of Fosco.

[janesteen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Where I got the book: public domain freebie on Kindle.This is one of those novels I've been promising myself I'd read for years. I was expecting a really creepy ghost story, but what I got surprised me. The plot: this is one of those Victorian novels told through a series of documents, with several narrators giving their accounts of the tale. Drawing teacher Walter Hartright has a nighttime encounter with a woman in white, and later learns that she has escaped from an asylum. By an amazing coincidence (in true Victorian fashion, the plot depends on many unlikely coincidences) he is summoned to the north of England to teach drawing to a young woman, Laura, who bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white and who is engaged to a much older man, Sir Percival Glyde. Laura and Walter fall in love, and Walter does the honorable thing and takes himself out of the picture as he is clearly too poor and socially inferior to marry an heiress. Walter's cause is espoused by Laura's half-sister, Marian Halcombe, who later joins Laura and her new husband as they set up house with creepy Italian Count Fosco, whose wife is Laura's aunt. The woman in white remains at large and continues to warn Walter (when he returns from the obligatory Dangerous Overseas Journey), Marian and Laura about Sir Percival's and the Count's evil intentions.Despite (or because of?) the inevitable Victorian tics of overly long descriptions, melodramatic touches and Amazing Coincidences, I found this to be a cracking good story. I was surprised to detect a feminist side to Collins; he is clearly sympathetic to the plight of the middle-to-upper-class Victorian woman, who either had to marry, often against her own inclination (Laura) or remain a spinster dependent on others for a home (Marian). I do wish, though, that Collins had not been quite so Victorian about the two women; he clearly portrays Laura as the only marriageable one of the two sisters because she is fair, delicate and doll-like where Marian is strong-featured (ugly, thinks Walter when he sees her) and strong-willed and therefore DOOMED to remain unmarried.Alas, Laura comes across as wishy-washy while Marian is a superb Victorian heroine: resourceful, intelligent, kind and generous. Even though she is ready to take action on Laura's behalf, though, Marian is true to her time in her belief that they can accomplish nothing without the support of a Man of pretty much any description. A bit frustrating for a modern female reader, but there it is. Collins does a much better job than his contemporary and friend Dickens of portraying the sad truth of the female condition; I can't help feeling that (unlike Dickens, who is a thoroughgoing misogynist at heart), Collins really likes women and is keen to portray them well. With the exception of the Count (whose real gloriousness as a villain is, intriguingly, seen mostly through Marian's eyes) the really interesting people in this novel are the women. I found The Woman in White to be quite a page-turner by the end, with reasonably intricate plotting that never became too convoluted to follow. I'm glad I read it, and wonder why I waited so long.

[kcoleman428 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is such AWESOME book! This was such a well written book, very understandable, and also very mysterious. I felt like I was being led through a labrynth, and there was always something popping out around each blind turn. If only mysteries no days were always so well crafted! Definetly a MUST READ!

[pidgeon92_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Good grief, this book took forever to read. Thank goodness it was well worth it! An excellent Victorian mystery; well-crafted and beautifully written.

[theeccentriclady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A masterpiece!This was a book I have had on my “to read” list since seeing it referred to in The Thirteenth Tale. I have been sprinkling in a classic here and there throughout my reading for a few years now. I picked it up as an audio book to listen to while sewing. I am so glad I chose this method as the various narrators gave the story life. Also at over 600 pages I would have put it off, choosing to get more books on my list read first. That would have been a big mistake!As I listened to this book I found myself questioning whether this was really written in the late 1800’s as I had thought. The writing was very contemporary and very easy to listen to. The plot in the beginning was simple enough and after a bit I thought editors today would have suggested cutting a lot out but then a new twist would be introduced and the story would grow more interesting. Mr. Collins did a superb job developing his characters and the story continued to unfold in a suspenseful way that keeps you wanting more. I actually sewed much longer than normal so I could continue to hear the story!This is a must read! A great book for discussion and a wonderful example of classic writing.

[fromthecomfychair · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic of its kind, and I suppose worth reading for that reason. Gothic mystery. Very long and wordy, in the style of the time.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that, with its mystery and eeriness, grabs your attention from the first chapter. A young drawing teacher, Walter Hartright, takes up a new position in Cumberland, and soon falls in love with his student, the lovely Laura Fairlie. But although she reciprocates his love, she is already promised to a baronet with designs upon her fortune. Sir Percival Glyde is not the only threat to Laura’s happiness and sanity; his alarming associate, Count Fosco, adds further complications to a sinister and intricate plot.

[jpporter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to read this book because it is credited with being one of the first detective/mystery novels in literature. I am not disappointed. Collins writes very well - in many ways much more accessibly than does his contemporary, Charles Dickens (who happens to be one of my favorite authors). Collins tells the story in a very novel way, as a series of "depositions" and journals that describe events from several different perspectives. That, in itself, was most interesting.The story is essentially the typical 18th - 19th Century romance - nice young lady falls in love with one man, but is promised to another, which other happens to be a nasty person. Ah, but loves conquers all, in the end.The only unfortunate thing about the book is Collins' willingness to succumb to the contrivances of his era - he may have begun a welcome branch of literature, but he could have breathed more soul into literature as a whole had he tried deviating from the felt need to make all of the good people happy in the end.