There are a few glaring gaps in my knowledge of Victorian novels, and Wilkie Collins used to be one of them. Though few of his novels are still familiar today (The Woman In White and The Moonstone being the two most famous), in his heyday he was a bestseller in the ranks of Dickens–and a great friend of Dickens, with whom he made many literary collaborations and who personally edited some of his work.
The Woman In White was Collins’s first blockbuster novel, and even today it is easy to see why. Widely billed as one of the first “sensation novels”, the Woman In White is still today a breath-holding page-turner of a book… and so, so smartly written to boot.
In format, the story is told chronologically as the formal statements of several narrators concerning the adventures of Laura Fairlie. The narrative is book-ended by Walter Hartwright, a drawing-master who first meets the woman in white and then becomes embroiled in fallout of her deadly “secret” which will lead to the “ruin” of Sir Percival Glyde, Laura Fairlie’s fiance.
As we switch from narrator to narrator, we feel the switch palpably. In the same way that Charlotte Bronte’s Lucy Snowe cannot be relied upon as an impartial narrator of her story, none of these narrators are capable of seeing or understanding the situation in its whole; indeed there are many parts where the reader knows more and many where the reader apprehends things that have been left out.
Though the novel was initially released as a serial, and we begin to feel it towards the end as Collins begins to run out of steam, the early and middle parts of the story must have been exhaustively laid out ahead of time. Handfuls of words come back with shocking significance two and three hundred pages later; things that Collins has talked us out of remembering affect the entire flow of the story. Most excitingly, Collins bucks many literary trends and refuses to make his good characters all good–his bad characters all bad–or let the automatic assumptions of the reader to very often play out. Indeed, one of the central assumptions of the whole book turns out to be a complete sham. I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself, though.
Having enjoyed the book so thoroughly, I discovered that a 1997 movie version of The Woman In White starring Simon Callow as Count Fosco existed (!!!), and just had to see it. What a mistake, and what a blessing. The TV movie has characters by the same name and puts them in generally the same kind of distress, but there the similarity ends. Characters are merged and mended, scene after scene is made up out of thin air, crimes of the most boring and sordid sort (murder! child abuse!) are committed that were never committed or thought of in the book, and that incidentally is one of the things that made the book so exciting, the fact that the villains were never dreadful in quite the way one expects. In the TV version, even Sir Percival Glyde’s “secret” is changed completely. You aren’t going to spoil one bit of the book for yourself by watching the movie first.
Do, do, do read this book if you’re up for a very long Victorian thriller that will keep you awake far into the wee hours, with your heart pounding in your throat and your mind racing to figure out what will happen next. I only wish I had a hundred such Victorian novels left to read that had a chance of being so good.
Bedtime Stories for Everyone 