The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is an enthralling Victorian mystery complete with kidnappings, romance, secret societies, murders and much more.
Walter Hartwright a poor drawing master, is commissioned to teach drawing to 2 young ladies - Marion Halcombe and Laura Fairlie. The evening before he leaves London for Limmeridge House, he encounters the mysterious woman in white, a woman whom Hartwright tries to help but cannot get out of his mind after the encounter and who seems to have a strange, almost fortuitous connection with the Fairlies. Soon after, he meets his students and loses his heart to the gentle, innocent and unnattainable Laura Fairlie who marries an English nobleman Sir Percival. Marion and Laura go to live with the dastardly Sir Percival, their aunt Countess Fosco and her husband the totally immoral and highly intelligent Count Fosco. But, the phantom presence of the elusive woman in white threads through the narrative and leads events to a terrible conclusion.
The plot unpaces in narrative format very much like a trial, with each person most closely concerned with the events giving testimony from their particular point of view. The genius of Collins is that each person has a distinctive voice and never once do we feel muddled about who has taken over the narrative. Victorian England has never seemed so full of romance and mystery as it is here. The Victorian style of writing complete with minute descriptions of the characters, their oftentimes fiendish motives and their psychology is amply exemplified here. Though, some of the plot reveals can be guessed by the astute reader, the pace of the narrative and the detailed, insightful writing is more than reason to enjoy this book.
I had this book sitting on my shelf for a couple of months, but each time I got around to reading it, the first chapter always threw me off. The start is slow but once you get over this drawback and after the appearance of the woman in white, I couldnt put it down and the story will not leave you disappointed.
Of course, the book has to contain some of the ideals of Victorian womanhood like the innocent, beautiful but feeble-minded Laura, whose excessive milkiness made me lose patience with her more than once but the author more than makes up for it with his Marion who has the’courage of a man’. Marion is clever, graceful, elegant and . ugly and doomed to spinsterhood. Even the villain of the piece Count Fosco professes his extreme admiration for her, so given this exemplary intelligent, feisty womanhood, why should she suffer such a fate? Is this a reflection of the Victorian sensibilities prevailing at the time, that the heroine of a popular novel would be the pure innocent that the hero, poor but the epitome of an’English gentleman’ and the ugly sister would move heaven an earth to protect and revenge? While this aspect of the story might not appeal to modern sensibilities, you have to admire such single-mindedness and selflessness towards another person as displayed by Hartwright and Marion in the story.
Collins’ novels are credited to be the first English detective novels and also an epitome of the epistolary novel format. This is certainly true of the two I have read by him, this one and the Moonstone. The Moonstone is as good, however I cannot be sufficiently objective to review it, given that it deals with the plunder of an Indian diamond and the events that follow. Both novels are sensational but also subscribe to the common English paranoia prevailing at the time regarding’foreigners’ and contain some sterotypes. The Woman in White has the excitable, calculating Italians while the less said of the Hindus in the Moonstone the better. Given all this, and my obviously mixed sentiments about the author and his writing, why would I recommend it? Read it if you have a thing for sensationalistic fiction, read it if you love the English detective novel, read it if you love musicals and have heard about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 adaptation of this book and lastly, read it if you like a solid atmospheric read with complex villains and good writing.