A
Genre: Classic, Mystery/Thriller
Do not under any circumstances start reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins unless you have nothing else to do, because once you pick it up your week will be shot. This book was originally released in serial format and was a huge sensation and by golly it’s still pretty hair-raising now.
The Woman in White has been called one of the first mystery novels as well as one of the first Victorian sensation novels. It also works nicely as a Gothic novel, given the recurring appearance of the mysterious woman in white, the shambles of the aptly named Blackwater Park, and the sheer number of over-the-top plot devices, each one of which I shamelessly adored. It also has pastoral moments as well as reliance on logic, deduction, and evidence.
The book is also packed with social commentary, most of it quite progressive for its time. The book addresses, in different ways and in harrowing detail, how women are at the mercy of their guardians and their husbands. There’s a lot of discussion about “foreigners” but at least one of the foreigners in question is great (another…not so much). The book features a heroine, Marian, who is absolutely wonderful. Even the villain gets a crush on her.
Allow me to try to introduce the characters and the basic conflict with the help of gifs. Our story begins on a misty night when a woman dressed all in white accosts a man named Walter. This woman drops the hint that she’s super scared of a Baronet and then off she goes. Some guys run up and ask Walter if he’s seen a woman in white, explaining that she has just escaped from an insane asylum. Walter doesn’t rat her out, but he does make this face:
Walter is an art teacher who subsequently gets a job teaching two women who are half-sisters (same mother, different fathers). The women are being raised, if you can call it that, by their comic relief useless uncle. One of the two women is Marian, who is whip smart and ferociously loyal. Marian is, alas, considered unattractive by Walter, on the grounds that Marian is not sufficiently feminine. Walter is an ass.
Marian’s half-sister Laura is the epitome of Victorian Angelic Womanhood: super pretty, incredibly passive, and dumb as a bag of hair. Laura is one of the only characters who never gets to narrate a chapter — in a story which is ostensibly about her, she remains voiceless. Dumb Walter falls madly in love with her immediately.
Basically, here’s poor Laura, as described by Marian:
In contrast, here’s Marian, the kind of Victorian heroine who keeps modestly claiming that she has only a woman’s courage as she marches off to smash patriarchy.
Alas for Walter and Laura, Laura is promised to another man. He is a Baronet! Coincidence? Oh, I think NOT!
Laura tells the Baronet, Sir Percival Glyde, that she is in love with another and he’s all, “Girl, you are a rich orphan and your uncle is useless, so off we go to get hitched! Bwah Ha Ha!”
When Laura comes back from her honeymoon and is reunited with Marian, Laura is already a shadow of her not-very-robust former self. To no one’s surprise, Sir Percival turns out to be a huge jerk. Sir Percival’s best friend, Count Fosco, is super great to read about, though he is described as enormously fat (our generation did not invent fat-shaming). His size is referred to as a repulsive quality – as is his fondness for his mice – and both may indicate that the Count, who appears to be friendly and helpful, might instead be sinister.
And yes, he really loves his pet white mice and lets them climb all over him.
No, no. To each their own! No judgement! I’m sure the Internet is full of people who love their pet mice so I will just leave that factoid here.
In my favorite bit of Victorian trivia to date, when The Woman in White came out people started naming their cats Count Fosco. This makes me almost ridiculously happy.
ANYHOO, of COURSE the Count, who is clever, is plotting with Sir Percival, who is not, to get Laura’s money, which is considerable. Of course, this means that only Marian can stop them — up until the point when she gets typhus from standing in the rain on a roof while eavesdropping and Walter returns from South America (!) where he was nursing a broken heart and turning into an action hero. At this point Walter kicks his butt into gear to save Laura with Marian’s help.
The events that follow include but are not limited to:
- False identities
- Secret babies
- Comic relief
- Satire
- Secret meetings
- A deadly fire
- Poison
- Insanity
- And terrible art
I cannot possibly sum this up. It’s a busy book.
I had not expected that a book with so much horror and tragedy would also be so funny. Here’s the extremely cranky Mrs. Catherick:
“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”
Here’s the useless uncle, AKA the laziest man in the world, on why actual children should be like the cherubs in Italian Art:
Quite a model family! Such nice round faces, and such nice soft wings, and-nothing else. No dirty little legs to run about on, and no noisy lungs to scream with. How immeasurably superior to the existing construction!
There’s Mrs. Vesey, an elderly woman who tends to doze off at table and who answers everything with “Yes, dear,” and the awful uncle again, complaining that his lawyer refers to a servant, who is being forced to hold up a book of etchings for the uncle to peruse, as a ‘man’:
“What can you possibly mean by calling him a man? He’s nothing of the sort. He might have been a man half an hour ago, before I wanted my etchings, and he may be a man in half an hour hence, when I don’t want them any longer. At present he is simply a portfolio stand.”
As you may detect, the awful uncle is only funny in the sense that he is so awful that he crosses the line twice – and leaves considerable social commentary in his wake.
The Woman in White wraps up with karmic justice and unusual living arrangements. Many college essays have been no doubt been written about portrayals of sexuality in the book, not to mention gender, identity, and the consistent description of Laura as “childlike” whereas Marian, who ran away with the book when it was published and who still does, is described as “masculine.”
All this intellectual content does not keep the book from being incredibly fun. I spent many happy hours turning the pages and saying, “Oh HO!” and “WHUT?” and “NO! He DIDN’T!” I strongly suspect that you will, too.
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I read this years ago and enjoyed it. Looks like it’s time for a re-read!
There is a great BBC radio dramatisation of this story starring Juliet Aubrey and Toby Stephens available on iTunes. It got me through a prolonged hospital stay and stopped me from going stir crazy and expiring from homesickness at the same time!
I listened to this on the CraftLit podcast and was blown away. I once avoided 19th century English novels like the plague, but after listening to this and North and South (not John Jakes), I am a little more open to them.
I read this years ago too, as well as Collins’ pioneering detective story The Moonstone. I watched the 1982 BBC TV series (sometime in the 1990s, mind you) with Diana Quick as Marian and Jenny Seagrove as Laura and it was wonderfully menacing, as I remember, despite the dowdy air that afflicted most British period dramas back then.
Oh, the The Woman in White! I ended up reading it after reading an excellent (though rather spoilery) parody of it (linked below). I was surprised how much I liked it as my patience for Victorian novels is usually slightly shorter than a nano-meter. I fell deeply in love with Marian and cheerfully despised Walter and Laura.
http://sarahtales.livejournal.com/194421.html
Count Fosco is the best! The most villainous villain to twirl a mustache, he kept me reading when I would have cheerfully drowned all the other characters in a sack. Of course, I basically agree with Uncle Lazy’s assessment of children, so my inclination to villainy may be stronger than most.
It is an *excellent* name for a cat.
So here I sit at Gate H8 with an hour till boarding a 3hr flight with a Kindle full of choices, including The Woman In White. What to do? What to do?
I’m so glad you reviewed this! Great book.
I LOVE this book and am so glad to see it listed here. I teach it in my Victorian Sensation Fiction classes and students eat it up! Marian is, indeed, an incredible character! Another great (and overlooked) Victorian mystery is Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel ‘Dene Hollow”— features a somewhat psychic servant and a haunted road. Like The Woman in White, it was a best-seller in it’s day and totally worth a re-read!
I adore this book! I love how it plays with gender archetypes in a sly way and has maybe the most fabulous villains in Victorian literature. A great classic for people who think they don’t like classics
Thank you for reviewing this book! I forgot how much I loved it.
I picked up No Time To Say goodbye, read it in one sitting. As I was waiting for my flight this was perfect except I didn’t have another book to read on the plane. Billy Adler Jr., I love all his books so that makes it better!
Oh my gosh, I am totally taking this on my upcoming vacation. It sounds AMAZING.
Thanks for this review and for bringing back memories! I remember reading The Woman in White while spending the summer at my grandparents’ farm. Twelve year old me may not have gotten all the references but I must have internalized some of Marian’s ‘tude for kicking ass in a man’s world. My TBR file is getting big again….
I read this two years ago and hated it – but you make it sound so wonderful!!! I want to read you detailed recap instead of the actual book.
I can’t remember if I’ve read this, so I probably haven’t. A grievous oversight, clearly! But I have read and can recommend “The Moonstone” for those who want more Wilkie Collins.
I have fond memories of reading “The Woman in White” in various trains in France and Italy during my junior year abroad. I was studying in England, and “The Woman in White” was the book I bought to bring with me when some friends and I were traveling during our winter break. This was in pre-Kindle days; we were traveling light, and I only brought one book, so it had to be a good thick one. “The Moonstone” is also excellent, and similarly readable.
If I’m remembering this correctly, Marian’s big flaw–the one that makes her completely undesirable to Walter–is that she has a visible mustache. Everything about this is puzzling, aside from the fact that she has facial hair (because, come on, mammals here). There’s Walter’s clear belief that no other women have facial hair, ever–does this mean that Collins somehow didn’t know it, either? Or that we are meant to see this as more evidence that Walter is clueless? And why did Collins give her a mustache? Is it to demonstrate that intelligent women are too masculine? This doesn’t stop Count Fosco from admiring her, of course…
Great review of an amazing book! The Moonstone is also very good (fine TV version a few years ago) and I’d loudly recommend many of his other books with energetic and useful heroines: No Name, Man and Wife and The Law and the Lady. Many have supernatural and/or grotesque elements.
Collins, who was a close friend of Dickens, wrote far more realistic women and addressed subjects such as the disabilities for women involved in marriage and the sexual double standard. He quite often has pairs of heroines: an attractive one and an effective one (Laura and Marian the clearest examples) plus the classic Madwoman in the Attic (or asylum) Anne Catherick. You quite often see such pairings in Victorian novels, as writers struggled with the notion that women might really be people (and protagonists), not just angels, demons, sidekicks or prizes. So many writers (e.g. Dickens) couldn’t tolerate the notion of combining brains and energy with attractiveness.
As a mid-teen I could not get through Wilkie’s ‘The Moonstone’ – and I would read just about anything then, R.F. Delderfield, , Dickens, Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Trollope – so I never tried ‘The Woman in White’. Maybe it’s time.
@Msb I feel like you’d appreciate this, even if you’ve already seen it: http://the-toast.net/2014/12/22/charles-dickens-internet-search-history/
Damn I miss the toast.
You make this sound like Wuthering Heights meets Cold Comfort Farm. Thank you for a fantastic review!!!
I really like this book, especially Marian. I saw the 1940s movie adaptation on TCM and they actually changed the ending so Walter falls in love with Marian instead of Laura. Which makes sense, since Laura is much less intersting.
@Heather: Remember that John Ruskin and Effie Gray’s marriage was dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation, presumably because he was so repulsed when he saw her naked for the first time and she had *gasp!* pubic hair. Supposedly, up to that time, he had only ever seen paintings/sculptures of women and they were not depicted with a muff. I have no idea if that’s true, but that’s what I learned in school and it does sort of fit with some of the ignorance and skewed perceptions about sex/women at the time.
One of THE BEST NOVELS ever written and I have ever read. Also highly recommend the Moonstone.
Thanks for the review, sounds intriguing. I just got the Kindle edition (this particular one was free on the Australian Amazon site) which is pretty sweet.
Looking forward to diving in. I noticed Moonstone was available free as well, fyi.
@ kkw
No, I had not seen it. Thanks, it’s a hoot.
I haven’t read this in ages, but your review is great fun! You remind me of Dan Simmons’ novel, Drood, where he riffs on Collins’ sensationalism and writes about the relationship between Collins and Dickens. Now I have to reread them both!
Thanks, Carrie!
Oh wow, I actually have a copy of this in my gigantic ebook backlog–snagged it back when the Nook first came out, and B&N was handing out free ebook copies of their in-house editions of various classics. Looks like I should pull this up the queue. 😀
Awesome! I just read an essay comparing the women in Stoker’s Dracula to the main women in this book, and it did not make me enthusiastic to read about a “mannish” “unattractive” “unfeminine” heroine. (Mina Harker is a fascinating contrast.) But now i think I’ll pick it up! Thanks!
I’m about to read this book for a bookclub and wanted to see what to expect. I thoroughly enjoyed your witty, thoughtful (and funny!) analysis and I hope that I enjoy the actual book just as much! I’m glad I found your website and look forward to reading some of your other reviews!