Wilkie Collins was a struggling young Victorian novelist and playwright until 1851, when he met Charles Dickens and his life changed. Dickens became his close friend and literary mentor, and began publishing some of Collins’ efforts in his own periodicals. Particularly in the period from 1859 to 1869, Collins put out his best work, including two masterpieces in the early detective novel genre known as “sensation novels.” Such novels combine the conventions of the Gothic and melodrama with Newgate novels, which dealt with the lives of criminals. Their setting evokes domestic realism, and the plot often hinges on some secret that must be discovered, hence the mystery. Collins’ two great contributions to this proto-detective novel are The Woman in White, serialized in Dickens’ journal All the Year Round in 1859 to 1860, and The Moonstone, also first serialized by Dickens in 1868. Both of these are well worth reading, especially if you’re a fan of detective fiction, or of Victorian novels. But if I must limit myself to one of these for my list, it’s going to be The Woman in White.
The book was popular but disliked by critics upon its initial publication. But there have been to date at least six dramatizations of the book, including an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical in 2004.
There were six silent film versions of the book (including one Austrian version), two sound films, and eight television dramatizations between 1966 and 2018, one a German miniseries, one Italian, one Pakistani, and one Soviet. There is even a 2010 computer game, “Victorian Mysteries: Woman in White.” Clearly the novel has had a very wide appeal since its publication more than 150 years ago. In 2003, The Woman in White was listed at number 23 in The Observer’s list of the “100 Greatest Novels of All Time,” and it also came in at number 77 on the BBC’s list of greatest British novels for “The Big Read.” And I am now including it as number 21 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
Collins had found a real case in a French “true crime” book that he fictionalized in The Woman in White. At his father’s urging he had obtained a law degree, though he ever worked as a lawyer, and instead used his legal knowledge to inform his early detective fiction. He based the structure of this novel on the way a lawyer might present a case before the court, drawing on several witnesses, so that the novel becomes something very like an old fashioned epistolary novel, with contributions from both major and minor characters.
Chief among these is Walter Hartright, a young artist hired by a wealthy hypochondriac named Frederick Fairlie to tutor his pretty and guileless young niece Laura Fairlie, and her older half-sister Marian Halcombe, a highly intelligent and capable woman, though one described by several characters as “unattractive.” En route to Limmeridge, Fairlie’s estate, Hartright meets a lone woman on the road who is dressed in white and seems to be fleeing pursuit by some men in a coach. Hartright helps her, and only later, at the estate, does he come to understand that this woman was Anne Catherick, who had lived near Limmeridge as a girl and was considered mentally handicapped, and that upon his encounter with her, she had just escaped from an asylum. Anne had been devoted to Laura’s mother, who was kind to her and first dressed her in white, a fashion she still maintains.
After a few months, Laura and Hartright fall in love, though this is discouraged by Marian because Laura has long been betrothed to her father’s friend, a certain baronet named Sir Percival Glyde. But Laura receives an anonymous letter urging her not to marry Glyde. Hartright, urged by Marian to leave Limmeridge so as not to stand in the way of Laura’s marriage, encounters Anne again briefly near Limmeridge itself, and suspects that Anne was the author of the anonymous letter, and also that Glyde was the one who had Anne committed to the asylum. He also believes that Anne is perfectly sound in mind. And he notes that there is a resemblance between Anne and Laura.
Laura does marry Glyde, despite her affection for Hartright, and despite her lawyer’s reservations about certain clauses in the marriage contract. The married couple takes an extended honeymoon to Italy, while Hartright joins a protracted expedition to Honduras. By the time Laura gets back from Italy and Walter from Central America, Laura’s marriage has entered a crisis stage. Can Marian, who is living with her sister on Glyde’s estate, or the now mortally ill Anne, who claims to have information that will bring Glyde down, team with Hartright to set things right? I can’t go any further than this without revealing a myriad of spoilers.
In addition to being a first-class early mystery-thriller, The Woman in White is remarkable for the narrative complexity mentioned earlier. The chief narrator is Hartright, who begins and ends the narrative and who has a particular audience in view. But some of the narration is taken from Marian’s diary, which Hartright relies on for events in which he had no part. Others who narrate smaller parts of the story, mostly for Hartright as he collects information, are Mrs. Clements, Anne Catherick’s friend and companion, Mr. Gilmore, the solicitor for the Fairlie family, and Frederick Fairlie himself, whose information is diluted by his own egoism. Mrs. Michelson, housekeeper at Glyde’s estate at Blackwater, provides Hartright information via letter, as does Mr. Gilmore, the solicitor for the Fairlie family. There are eight narrators in all, and their testimony allows the reader to piece together the mystery much as Hartright has to do himself.
Later in his career, Collins’ novels were criticized as specimens of propaganda, written solely to preach against certain social ills. The Woman in White, one of his early novels, is innocent of that particular sin. But that does not mean that Collins hasn’t got a particular social problem in mind, and in fact his treatment of this theme is one of the aspects of the novel that makes it significant today. Collins explores the difficulties and likely abuses of the position of married women under the law in Victorian England. Money and property held in a woman’s name would by default go to her husband upon her death—a policy that invited abuses, as it does in this novel. Worse, any woman could be interred in a “lunatic asylum” on the sole recommendation of a male relative, without even the need for an examination by a trained professional before commitment. The Woman in White provides a chilling censure of the patriarchy at its grimmest. The late 19th century was not all that long ago, folks. The Handmaid’s Tale remains uncannily relevant.
The only quibble I have with the novel is that Laura is really a rather insipid, colorless heroine, while her “unattractive” sister Marian is a figure with substantial charm, wit, and agency, and yet Hartright blindly focuses on Laura throughout. I have a feeling a lot of readers shake their heads over this strange state of affairs, and wonder why Collins, a shatterer of women’s bonds, seems to accept unquestionably the notion that a pretty face overshadows all other virtues. Oh well, no book is perfect.