Review of The Woman in White (1860)

Review of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, Penguin Classics, Introduction and Notes by Matthew Sweet (2003)

Wilkie Collins (1824 – 1889) was an English novelist and playwright His unusual Christian name was after his godfather, a painter friend of his father’s called David Wilkie. His father was quite a successful and accomplished landscape painter. Known mainly for the novel The Woman in White (1860), Wilkie Collins became a successful novelist. This was an early mystery novel and what was then called a sensation novel, which laid down the foundation or ground rules for the modern detective novel. It is also perhaps the earliest example of the police procedural genre. Moreover, it is a novel that combines aspects of Gothic horror with psychological realism. Also, Collins uses a “startlingly innovative” structure (Matthew Sweet, Introduction, p. xvi), namely, he dispenses with the usual authorial technique of “omniscient narrator” and allows the very characters encountered in the text to take up the stories as the plot progresses. Uncontrolled by any omniscient narrator, these various character-narrators are surely free to lie to us. Indeed, as we find out as the story evolves, Count Fosco’s testimony contains obvious falsehoods.

A fluent speaker of both Italian and French from his early adolescent days living in those countries before his family returned to England, Collins was well acquainted with diverse characters and cultural milieux. In 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became his friend and mentor. Some of Collins' work soon appeared in Dickens' journals, which led to their collaboration on drama and fiction. He soon gained financial security and an international following by the 1860s.

I read this book on my brother’s recommendation as he had studied it in a literature course he had done with the Open University. It is good for the soul to read novels, and early ones at that, to sample the beginnings and eventual growth of the modern novel. I found this book a gripping read, being a mystery novel that holds one’s interest from beginning to end. It is, therefore, a classic Victorian mystery about an art teacher called Walter Hartright, who encounters a distressed woman clad solely in white. He becomes obsessed with her overpowering anxiety and strange allure, and before long gets pulled into a sinister plot of identity theft and greed linked to that character. Again, this latter theme is a highly unusual and very prescient and amazingly modern theme for 1860, and this subject, along with the investigative inquiries of Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe, adds both sophistication, intrigue and profound layers to the plot.

It is important to note that before it was a stand-alone novel, the story was printed in weekly instalments from November 1859 to August 1860 across two major literary magazines, one in England (in All The Year Round, a famous literary magazine founded and managed by Charles Dickens), the other in America (in Harper's Weekly). The fact that its origin lies in weekly instalments would add to the sustained suspense to keep the magazine subscribers interested. That suspense lives on in the novel form itself, which made its official debut in full book form in August 1860. It was published as a traditional Victorian "triple-decker" (a novel split into three separate volumes) by the publishing house Sampson Low, Son, & Co. based in London.

I will avoid summarising the story in order to avert spoiling for the reader any of the plot twists and turns, or major surprises. On his way to an art tutoring job at Limmeridge House, Walter Hartright meets a frightened woman dressed entirely in white who asks for directions and who appears later to have escaped from an asylum. At Limmeridge, Walter meets Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe. He realises Laura and the stranger in white, Anne Catherick, look almost identical. Walter and Laura fall in love, but Laura is already promised to marry Sir Percival Glyde. Unable to bear the disappointment, Walter leaves the house heartbroken and sets out on an archaeological expedition to Central America, specifically Honduras. He cannot run far enough from his dismay and dejection.

This comprehensive and gripping novel explores many themes: romantic love, arranged marriages, marriage breakdown, and the legal powerlessness of women (under Victorian law, a woman's property automatically belonged to her husband upon marriage). Other themes that are discussed dramatically in the action are the illusion of nobility, the merit of the middle classes, which were rising in prominence during those Victorian times and the threat of the outsider or foreigner to national and personal fortunes. With all of these themes and other interwoven sub-stories such as that of the weaponising of madness and identity theft, the reader is in for a treat in this suspenseful mystery and sensation novel.

To conclude this review, I would like to state that Wilkie Collins is amazingly gifted at describing his characters, some of whom are exceedingly mysterious. Most are drawn with such effectiveness that they walk off the page. One well-drawn character who intrigued and enchanted me is the larger-than-life Count Fosco, an Italian polyglot, a chemist, an erudite scholar, but a villain painted ever so mysteriously courteous and kind on the outside. When we meet him, h e is described thus:

… he has brought with him to this house a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and a whole family of white mice. He attends to all the necessities of these strange favourites himself, and he has taught the creatures to be surprisingly fond of him, and familiar with him. The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous bird towards everyone else, absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it hops on his knee, and claws its way up his great big body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in the most caressing manner imaginable… [his canaries] perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one…. His white mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wire-work, designed and made by himself… They crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white as snow on his capacious shoulders… But the Count, apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast between his colossal self and his frail little pets. (p. 219—220)

For the colourful, well-depicted characters alone, this novel is well worth reading. As the colloquial saying goes, “this is a thumping good read.” Highly recommended.