Books: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

paper cover for U.S. edition,
published in 1860 by Harper's

This book, along with Collins' other famous novel, The Moonstone, has been recommended to me at times by reader friends and teachers who know how much I love English literature and mystery novels. It's  a seminal classic, one of the first mystery-romance-Gothic, if not the first, a prototype for the Sensation Novel genre. It was wildly popular when it was published in 1860.

Thackeray is said to have missed the theatre to read it. Gladstone and Prince Albert read it avidly. The story was based on an actual kidnapping and imprisonment in an insane asylum that happened in 1809, recounted in Recuil de Causes Célèbres. 

Hollywood movie, 1948

The book was probably one of the first to model the possibility of marketing spin-offs.  Perfumes, dresses, cloaks, bonnets, all labeled after the title were for sale. About 11 film/TV versions have been made, the latest in 2017.

  Andrew Lloyd Weber set a musical on the narrative in 1997.

So when my mystery book club chose read it I did. Gentle reader, it's very very long, so be prepared. A young drawing teacher is stopped for directions as he travels to London on a dark night by a woman in white who places a hand on his shoulder, evidently coming up behind him.  What woman would do this in 1860? A woman who has escaped from an insane asylum, we learn later.

Onward. A long and convoluted narrative begins, involving two mysterious women (Catherine and Laura) in white, mistaken identity,insanity, their mother, a fabulous cemetery scene, Walter, the handsome drawing instructor, a swindled fortune, an evil, crafty friend, and a dead father. 

The father of our rich heroine insists she marry a friend of his, which she doesn't want to do but does because she feels she has a moral obligation. Lots of back and forth about class structure, the place of women, what's proper, temptation resisted.

Illustration from Harper's Weekly, 185

I was reminded of Clarissa, written in 1748 by Samuel Richardson. It too, was scandalous and wildly popular. It’s discussed in Leslie Fiedler's famous book of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, a must read in 1960. (Clarissa Harlowe is seduced by the evil Lovelace, somehow against her will, and ruined.) I got really exasperated with both Clarissa and the characters in TWIW because of their endless sensitivities, worries, mulling over and over about what to do. But that's my failing; it's like the audience screaming "don't walk down that dark street at midnight alone, you twit!"

   "...Margaret Oliphant hailed it as "a new beginning in fiction", while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as "great trash". And while Henry James disliked the "ponderosity" of The Woman in White (calling it "a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe"), he acknowledged that the book had "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors". (The Manchester Guardian review).

Sometimes it seems to me that the English novel really has but one theme, the problem of patriarchy, and the plight of women and the evil sins committed against them. Think of Thomas Hardy. Think of the insane women in English literature (Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot's wife), Rebecca, Jane Eyre.  

“Above all, perhaps, “The Woman in White” shows how unusually attuned Collins was to the vulnerability of women in Victorian society and the ease with which they could be tumbled from their place. Only a couple of years earlier, Bulwer-Lytton had had his own fractious wife committed to an asylum.”  - The New Yorker

So, I think I've made my case that The Woman in White deserves to be read, and needs to be on any serious reader's completed list. It's elegantly and beautifully written, filled with sensuous and vivid imagery.  

"The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!"

 I gave myself over to the languid pace, but still was sustained by suspense as I read on and on. I hope you will, too. Just settle in for a long delicious read.