The Woman in White

Title: The Woman in White, 1859

Author: Wilkie Collins, b. 1824 d. 1889

Genre: Fiction, Mystery, and "Sensation"

Themes: Victorian society, marriage, psychology

Review: No one said I have to finish reading a book before I start to review it, right? I'm on page 197 of 627 of The Woman in White, a Victorian novel written in 1859 by Wilkie Collins.

To introduce the book, I could do no better than recite straight from the Matthew Sweet's introduction, found in my 1999 Penguin edition of the novel:

The Woman in White is generally regarded as the first sensation novel, an enormously influential branch of Victorian fiction which fused the apprehensive thrills of Gothic literature with the psychological realism of the domestic novel.

Let me put it this way, Wilkie Collins did the one thing guaranteed to make proper, literate Victorians shiver in their corsets and cravats... he took society's freaks, lunatics and shrouded mystics, emptied them out of their insane asylums, and recast them as Lords and Ladies now sipping tea in your sitting room.

In the very opening pages of The Woman in White, Collins brings a demure painting instructor named Walter Hartright face-to-face with "a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London..." on a moonlight night on an isolated road.

Then, Collins sends Walter Hartright to a country manor (Limmeridge House) to teach painting to two young woman—one of whom looks almost identical to the mysterious woman in white he met on the road, and other who has a beautiful figure, but the face of a man.

I won't give away too much of the plot, except to say that there is love, a problem with social class, another run in with the woman in white, a neurotic and selfish uncle, and an arranged marriage all within the first 197 pages.

In fact, Collins has a very detailed style of storytelling with multiple narrators. Reading Collins is like attending a court hearing... every character takes the stand and carefully gives his or her version of the story; even journal excerpts from one character's journal are considered.

Today, Collins prolific style might seem verbose, but in its time, I imagine Victorian readers biting their nails, gasping, and worrying over the details. The Woman in White and Collins's second novel, The Moonstone, were both published in Charles Dickens's periodicals. Waiting for each new issue to be published would be like waiting for the next episode of 24 or CSI Miami to air—thrilling!

At the same time, I've read other reviewers like myself complaining that Collins lacks a literary "it" factor and that his books should not be approached as Victorian classics.

What do I think?

No, Collins is not as famous or well-remembered as his friend Charles Dickens. And yes, in comparison, I do find that Collins's characters are sometimes flat and even cliche. (In The Woman in White, the heiress Laura Fairlie (later, Lady Glyde) is constantly pale, meek, virtuous, unblemished and beautiful—radical and horrible events happen, but her disposition never changes.)

But, Collins is not Dickens. And Collins  is not trying to impress us with his understanding of humanity. He is trying to make the hairs on the back of our necks stand up straight! If you read The Woman in White, expect to be thrust into an action packed plot. Expect bizarre and mysterious things to happen. Expect some lunatics to come to tea.