What Book to Read?

If you like Dickens, you’re sure to like the books of Wilkie Collins. Even if you don’t much care for Dickens, but like Victorian mystery and melodrama, then Collins is the writer for you.

The Woman in White is probably his most popular book, both when it was written in 1860, and today. It is a complex conspiracy of deception, and is seen as the forerunner of ‘sensation’ fiction.

The plot of The Woman in White had its origins in a French crime in which a Marquise was drugged and held prisoner under a false name so that her brother could inherit her estate. The story also had origins much closer to home. Walking with a friend one night Collins had heard a piercing scream from a nearby villa, then saw dashing from the house ‘the figure of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than to run … in an attitude of supplication and terror.’  Collins ran to assist her. She was Caroline Graves, recently widowed with an infant daughter. She said she had been held captive at the house for several months ‘under threats and mesmeric influence’. Before long she and Collins were living as man and wife, though they were not actually married. It has been suggested that the two faces of Caroline – the newly respectable lady and the abused women of questionable background – are reflected in the look-alike characters in The Woman in White, Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick.

The story begins when Walter Hatright, a drawing master, meets a mysterious woman dressed in white on a lonely road, and helps her escape pursuit. Soon after, Walter is employed to teach sketching to Laura Fairlie and her half sister Marian Halcombe, and to catalogue drawings in the possession of their rich and selfish uncle. Walter is startled to see that Laura bears a strange resemblance to the woman he met on the road. Laura and Walter fall in love, but Laura feels she must honour the arrangement made by her dead father that she marry his old friend Sir Perceval Glyde. Walter is heartbroken, but pledges always to come to her aid if the need arises. It does, of course, after Laura is drawn into a fatal conspiracy, with only her sister Marian to help her.

The story of the conspiracy is told by several different characters, each recounting only what they have personal knowledge of, a method which Collins adopted after he witnessed testimony being given in a trial. The narrators include Hartright, a family lawyer, Marian Halcombe and Count Fosco, who is a friend of Sir Perceval, and several others. Through this method the reader is reassured that everything will come right in the end, because otherwise the story wouldn’t be being told. But on the way, the reader only knows as much as the character does at the time, thus building up tension and foreboding. I think Collins manages different voices of these characters brilliantly. He has also created a very clever puzzle which Walter and Marian have to unravel.

The Woman in White is a long book – no doubt it seemed shorter in its original serial form – and its language and sentiment are Victorian. Some of the social attitudes and beliefs held by the characters are not those of today. For example, Collins’s characters believe in the importance of dreams, and there is one crucial semi-supernatural coincidence in the story. All this has put some people off reading his work. But the story, though complex, is simply and directly told. The characters are mostly believable and even when somewhat overdrawn, always interesting. And the details which establish the setting and atmosphere of the plot are directly relevant to the action.

In my view, The Woman in White is definitely worth reading, and Collins certainly deserves the renewed interest readers are now taking in his work.