The Woman in White  by Wilkie Collins
First published 1860
Category: Classic

Wilkie Collins’ novels are considered the forerunners of today’s mystery and detective novels.  What this usually means to the modern reader is a book that seems dull, cliched, with an easy to predict plot–because all the mysteries we’re used to have developed beyond the originals, and what was new and fresh a century and more ago has now been done to death.  This is definitely not the case with The Woman in White.  It’s suspenseful and gripping and had me unable to stop reading until all its secrets were revealed.

This is another one of those semi-epistolary novels of the 19th century–a style I love to see reconceived in the 20th and 21st.  The conceit is actually more of a collection of testimonies that taken as a whole recount a very strange story.  The main narrator, Walter Hartright, mentions occasionally how he managed to get verbatim records from the different people who tell the story, including how one of the first chronologically was the last he took down.  It’s a very effective conceit that allows for different perspectives without stretching belief.

The story itself verges on the Gothic just enough to make it creepy, but not totally unbelievable.  Hartright is engaged as a “drawing-master” for two young women, half-sisters, who live at the Limmeridge estate with their sort-of guardian, Mr. Fairlie.  Marian Halcombe is dark, unattractive in face, and poor; Laura Fairlie is fair, beautiful, and an heiress.  Marian is the clever one, and Laura is sweet and innocent.  Guess who Hartright falls in love with?  That’s right.  Jane Austen had something to say about this–about how an unaccountable bias toward a pretty face often leaves a man married to a very silly woman–but Laura is at least an honorable, decent girl. Unfortunately, she’s engaged to someone else, and Hartright is too poor to marry her anyway, so tragedy ensues.  Complicating matters is the occasional appearance and disappearance of the “woman in white,” the mentally unstable Anne Catherick, whose instability is either more or less than we realize, and who has a remarkable resemblance to Laura Fairlie.

That’s the setup.  I would be doing you a serious disservice (see, Collins’s prose has infected me!) if I said anything else about the plot, because from this point it becomes a true mystery.  Who is Anne Catherick?  What Secret does she know about Laura’s fiancee and later husband, Sir Percival Glyde? What power does his strange Italian friend Count Fosco hold over him?  Collins sets things up so there are obvious answers to these questions, but they’re all the wrong ones; and even when you think you know the real answers, you still don’t know the why of anything.

Collins isn’t any better about gender than any man writing in his time.  The book is full of crap about “women’s gentler natures” and even Marian, that strong-minded heroine, says derogatory things about her own sex and their weaknesses. And, of course, Marian’s mannish face and wits condemn her to a life of being her sister’s companion rather than having a family and life of her own.  I wonder only that any intelligent woman of that era could bear the condescension without hauling off and punching someone.  It’s a stark contrast to Bram Stoker, writing barely forty years later, who idealizes his female characters but also allows them strengths they don’t have to apologize for.  Still, I’ve always had a hard time criticizing writers simply for being a product of their environment; I’d like to think that a writer would be able to see past the fog of societal convention, but they’re just human, after all.  And Collins is a Romantic as well as an early Victorian (middle Victorian?), so the overflowing of emotion everyone has is almost as annoying to me as his editorializing about What Women Are Like.

Go read it.  Read The Moonstone, too, for another great example of early detective fiction.  It is, like Dracula, a kind of prose we modern readers are unfamiliar with, but the payoff is worth the struggle.