The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins

*contains spoilers*

Henry James, whilst he lambasted this great work rather unfairly as “great trash”, went on to concede that for the first time the author’s novelist, Wilkie Collins, had brought the sensational mystery right “at our own doors”, making room for at least some understanding for the huge anticipation that awaited each instalment in the All Year Round magazine – not unlike the kind that Collins’s good friend and fellow All Year Round contributor, Charles Dickens, could expect. In fact, Walter Hartright’s opening narrative voice followed on immediately from Dickens’s own ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, which, incidentally, I often cite as my favourite book if I’m ever pushed that far in immediate conversation.

But enough of Dickens – let us instead discuss Collins’s incredible novel, ‘The Woman In White’, which throughout kept me enthralled in a page-turning daze because of its hugely complex and yet gratifying story. I could go on and on about the story, which ducks and weaves the reader’s grip through a shifting narrative voice – characters pass the burden of elucidating the facts of the tale as the events unfold, without confusion, under the conceit of a collation of written diary entries and letters at the culmination of all the happenings – but the crowning glory of this work is Collins’s ability to paint and shade his characters. Consider Count Fosco, whose self-serving pragmatism and deception is shrouded in a gentlemanlike demeanour and countered by a naturalist’s concern for his animals. This is none more apparent as Eliza Michelson, in her testimony, vehemently defends the Count as a man of “the manners of a true nobleman…It is in such little delicate attentions that the advantages of aristocratic birth always show themselves.”

Collins further attacks notions of aristocracy as he makes a point of the discrepancy between the nobility of blood and the nobility of actions in the dying pages of ‘The Woman In White’, as Walter Hartright recounts Countess Fosco’s devotion to her husband in her publishing a fawning biography of his domestic habits (as opposed to his more malevolent aspect: his adherence to the machinations of espionage) upon his murder in Paris; “His life was one long assertion of the rights of the aristocracy…” These “rights” of which she speaks are of course the means to a decent education and thus a fundamental power over the common person. This complicated and multi-faceted issue of servitude to a better class continues as Collins addresses the power men have over women – particularly in marriage, as Countess Fosco’s behaviour reasserts – but much further than that in Glyde’s providing Mrs Catherick an allowance keeping her from penury. In this way, Mrs Catherick is just another weapon in Glyde’s armoury, to be wielded at the first sign of trouble, so as to protect his growing list of secrets and deceptions over the years.

In a den thick with wretches such as the putrid Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, not to mention the devious Mrs and Mr Rubelle (aptronymous for the Rubella disease, surely) and the cowering Frederick Fairlie, Collins allows us some consolation with the resolute and devoted pair, Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe – though Hartright marries Miss Halcombe’s half-sister, Laura Fairlie, it is his connection to Marian that rings most profoundly. Hartright is in fact Glyde’s antithesis, as he positively avoids any notion of deceit, even as he operates on uncovering the truth which will set the oppressed and manipulated free; “…there was something so repellent to me in the idea [of deceit]…In my own character I had acted thus far – and in my own character I was resolved to continue to the end.”

This is a great work; read for the story, stay for the characters, admire for the sentiments.