The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road--there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the haven--stood the figure of 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, as I faced her.

I was too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.

'Is that the road to London?' she said.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: it is possible to trace in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White the origins of all the hackish novels they sell on stands in airports, novels like The Da Vinci Code, with their outrageous secrets and puzzle box plots. These novels engage the reader by unfolding a central mystery, layer by layer, withheld at intervals, and the plot is subordinated to the contrivances needed to keep the mystery from unfolding all at once: a character with the required knowledge is killed, or perhaps is just a woman, who swoons or becomes gravely ill and too delirious to share what it is she knows. The dignifying effects of time give The Woman in White a sense of respectability; but it's hard not to imagine that "serious" readers turned their noses up at the coincidences, the exaggerated melodramatics. Popular novels have a way of congealing into "classics," but The Woman in White is probably best read as what it was to the Victorians: a silly, shaggy mystery story.

The plot is hard to describe without unpeeling too many of the mysterious layers. Walter Hartwright, meets a mysterious woman dressed in white, trying to find her way into the heart of London. The woman, who turns out to have escaped from a lunatic asylum, makes foreboding allusions to Limmeridge House in Cumberland, where Hartwright is about to take a position. At Limmeridge House, Hartwright falls in love with one of a pair of sisters, Laura Fairlie, but she has promised her now-dead father to marry a baronet named Sir Percival Glyde. But an anonymous letter, clearly sent by the "woman in white," suggests that Sir Percival is not to be trusted, and sure enough, once the two are marreid, Sir Percival--along with his flamboyant Italian co-conspirator Count Fosco, whose grandiloquent malice is the best thing in the book--sets to work conniving away Laura's fortune. Oh, did I mention that Laura and the woman in white look almost exactly alike?

The Woman in White is cleverly arranged in a series of first-person narratives that enable its mysteries to unfold piece by piece. The first and third sections are mostly narrated by Hartwright, who is conveniently shuffled off to Central America in the middle to allow Sir Percival and Count Fosco to work their dastardly plans on Laura and her sister Marian, who narrates most of the middle section. But other narratives crowd the margins, by servants, lawyers, and doctors, each of whom offers a piece of the larger puzzle. 

Like I said, The Woman in White can seem very modern: it's not hard to imagine Dan Brown or, oh, Lee Child, or Janet Evanovich, or whoever those people are, from employing the same strategies. But it's a Victorian novel with Victorian anxieties, first and foremost the legal subordination of women to men. Laura marries because of her father's, then her uncle's wishes, and as Sir Percival's wife she is threatened primarily by his legal guardianship of her. Much of the drama of the book's middle revolves over whether Laura will or will not consent to give her signature to a legal document which Sir Percival hasn't allowed her to read. It's tempting to see the book as essentially feminist, critical as it is of Sir Percival's outsized power, but then again, Collins imports Hartwright again at the end--in his likeness as the husband that should have been--not to offer a radical version of women's liberation, but an encouragement for men to act as better shepherds.

There's the anxiety, too, around identity and rank: Laura, for instance, is captured and placed in the asylum under the name of Anne Catherick, the woman in white, because of their extreme likeness. (I'm no expert, but I think there's something here about the increasing reliance on law, on paperwork and signatures and things like that, to organize society: who are we when we rely on documents to affirm our identity?) This anxiety extends to questions of rank and status: what does it mean to be a baronet, anyway? Is it about money? (Sir Percival has none.) Is it about the way you are seen in the community? (Sir Percival is widely hated.) Again, is it about having your name written down in the social register? (And what of the marriage register that Hartwright suspects has forged Sir Percival's birthright?) For a Victorian, The Woman in White must have captured the drama that surrounded identity in a world that was rapidly industrializing and changing in all sorts of ways.

For a modern reader (me), it's just a lot of fun. There's swooning ladies, complicated identity-swapping, a burning church, clandestine letters, poisons, secret societies--The Woman in White is stuffed with so much of that stuff that even Dan Brown would think it's too much, I think. But maybe in 100 years or so we'll be reading his works with a different eye, too.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

The hardest types of books to write reviews for are not the complex, thematically deep ones where the biggest problem is how to reduce the book into 500 words and do it justice. Nor are they the godawful disappointments, which at least lend themselves to kvetching, always a treat for the vitriolic reviewer. No, the most difficult is the excellent book damned with the faint praise of "Good for what is is"; the well-charactered, well-plotted page turner, worthy of ink and praise but doesn't lend itself to much analysis. For me, The Woman in White was exactly that sort of book.

Mild Spoilers Follow.

The story, told in a bastardized epistolatory format by way of the diaries, letters, etc. of several different narrators, is complex and intricately plotted. Walter Hartright, a young art teacher, is commissioned to teach two sisters, Marian and Laura Halcombe, on the secluded Cumberland estate. On his way to the estate, he unwittingly aids the titular Woman, Anne Cathrick, who has recently escaped a mental institution. Upon finally arriving at Cumberland, he falls in love with Laura, and becomes close friends with Marian, her older and less attractive older sister. He leaves the position and the estate after learning that Laura is engaged to the clearly skeevy landowner, Sir Percival Glide. Laura is married and then the real story begins, as Glide and his mysterious friend Count Fosco set into motion a complicated plan to steal Laura's money and end the threat posed to them by the enigmatic Anne Catherick.

Spoilers End Here.

From my opening paragraph and the plot summary, I don't want to give the idea that The Woman in White isn't a good book. It is, in fact, one of the best mystery/suspense novels I have ever read. James Patterson could learn something about crafting complex, believable plots, and almost anyone could benefit from Collins' tight, frequently witty prose. The characters are also well-formed, two in particular. Marian Halcombe may be one of the earliest feminist characters in literature, consistently besting the men in the story in both emotional control and logical thinking. Count Fosco is also very well drawn, a gentleman control-freak who seems to know everything that happens around him and has an almost romantic attachment to Marian.

Like I said, I don't really know what to say about this book. There's not a lot of food for thought her besides trying to suss out the expertly-paced twists and turns, and it' probably not goig to change your life. But it's enjoyable, it tells a good story, and I'm glad I read it. Sometimes, that's more than enough.