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The Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics)
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Product Description
The story begins with an eerie midnight encounter between artist Walter Hartright and a ghostly woman dressed all in white who seems desperate to share a dark secret. The next day Hartright, engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie and her half sister, tells his pupils about the strange events of the previous evening. Determined to learn all they can about the mysterious woman in white, the three soon find themselves drawn into a chilling vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.
Masterfully constructed, The Woman in White is dominated by two of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction—Marion Halcombe, dark, mannish, yet irresistibly fascinating, and Count Fosco, the sinister and flamboyant “Napoleon of Crime.”
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #269294 in Books
- Published on: 2005-04-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 672 pages
Editorial Reviews
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The opening line of Wilkie Collins’s enormously popular novel The Woman in White is one of the more confrontational in narrative history: “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” It is a statement of mystery as well as a challenge. Pausing here, a reader is likely to wonder about what trials await this poor woman and to speculate on what constitutes her relationship to this resolute man. Is he the cause of her travails, or is he her rescuer? Why must she be forced to endure what one presumes can be only cruelties? And why must she so patiently withstand them at all, rather than fight back herself? Even beyond these contemplations, what are we to make of an author who begins his tale this way? Does he enjoy seeing women suffer, for example? And more important, to what sadistic ends will our own attention be put?
A more famous set of lines preceded this opener on the same page of its first serial installment, and when one contrasts these sentences, Collins’s abruptness and somewhat harsh tone become even more unsettling. The Woman in White appeared first in serial form in Charles Dickens’s weekly publication All the Year Round, from November 26, 1859, to August 25, 1860 (and simultaneously in the United States in Harper’s Weekly, from November 25, 1859, to August 4, 1860). More interestingly, it commenced one column over from the conclusion of Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities, and the juxtaposition of the inspirational final words of Dickens’s text with the chilling first words of Collins’s cannot fail to capture the reader’s attention. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known,” Sydney Carton proclaims in the legendary last line from A Tale of Two Cities, as he goes to the guillotine in place of a better man than he so that this man may return to the woman Carton himself loves. He certainly demonstrates resolution, as well as enacting a personal redemption, in making the ultimate sacrifice, and for the contemporary reader—or today’s reader who wants to perform an interesting comparison—Collins’s hero, no matter who he turns out to be, obviously has a lot to live up to. Sydney Carton is a hard act to follow.
But these brusque new lines of Collins’s signify a larger shift in temperament between the two novels, a move from Dickens’s brilliantly evolved characterizations, vast social sweep and scale, and stateliness of narrative to Collins’s heralding the advent of the pure sensation novel, of which The Woman in White represents an early and prime example. Collins is universally acknowledged as the master of the Victorian sensation novel, a wildly popular genre that managed to transmit the shocks and surprises familiar to readers of hair-raising Gothic novels but that contained no, or generally no, supernatural elements. Yet the usually domestic crimes described in sensation novels—whose authors prided themselves on their realism in opposition to outrageous Gothic conventions—were mainly of a lurid nature and many times were impossible to imagine happening in the real world. As an anonymous critic of the trend argued in the Dublin University Magazine (February 1861), “The spirit of modern realism has woven a tissue of scenes more wildly improbable than the fancy of an average idealist would have ventured to inflict on readers beyond their teens.” Sensation fiction was precursor of the mystery thriller and the detective novel, and it proved extremely attractive to a Victorian audience primed with an appetite for scandal and for shocks that could not be sated by the gruesome accounts of crimes readers devoured in the cheap daily newspapers.
Customer Reviews
My "read of the year"
Let me say this -- I LOVED this book. I devoured it over a couple of days and have reread pages and passages since. I don't often choose to read victorian gothic, but the characters and the plot devices really hooked me. Setting: England, circa 1800s. Lush countryside estates. Characters: Two half sisters, bound through maternal line -- one rich, one poor -- one pretty, one not so much -- one very clever, the other, well is a tool to be abused. And get this -- an obese count to play the part of villain along with a dastardly baronet to wed an orphan girl.....you'll love it. And also -- get the Andrew Lloyd Webber CD of the musical with the same name AND watch the masterpiece theater version as well. Three ways to enjoy this splendid tale. I would rate it higher than 5 stars if I could!
Overnight Sensation
Wilkie Collins, friend of Dickens and progenitor of the detective mystery novel, is quite the writer. I can see why Dickens would befriend him and give him valued column space in his serials, and I can see why Collins would chafe at being considered the protege of Dickens. In some ways, but not all and not ultimately, Collins is the better writer - Collins handles mystery and anger better than Dickens.
After reading Woman in White or Collin's mystery-starter The Moonstone (Modern Library Classics) and some biographical background on Dickens (for example the encyclopedic Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens (Oxford Reader's Companions)), you should try Drood: A Novel. While fictional, Drood does a good job of painting the joys and tensions of Collins' friendship with Dickens, the sources and seducers of Collins' artistic skill, and the uniqueness and desperation of Collins' social standing and spiraling drug use. Collins and Dickens were larger-than-life characters in some ways better than any they ever created.
Collins here creates the Sensation novel by marrying Gothic horror with the shock of realism in a blend that electrified the reading public of 1860, especially in its original serialized publication with weekly installments leaving readers dangling in suspense from week to week. In its day, long before NBC's advertising shills created the phrase, this was "must-see TV" of the mind. There are no Gothic haunted houses or ghosts here, no mystics or seances, although there are wild moors, rainy nights, and dark graveyards. The Sensation was created by placing real people in settings that resonated with the social settings and concerns of the time--class conflicts, loveless arranged marriages, false imprisonment in mental institutions, poison potions . . . . OK, so this isn't gritty 20th century realism, but it is a magnitude nearer to true life than say, Edgar Allan Poe's stories of a few years before.
The "Woman in White" is a tale of half-sisters Marion, older, more independent, but unattractively fading into devoted spinsterhood service to the younger Laura, the enigmatic blond beauty who is committed to an arranged marriage to a much older man to whom she promised her betrothal as a child by her father's deathbed. Her husband Sir Percival Glyde is no catch despite his title, and when he runs into money trouble due to his profligate living, his violent temper and sordid past come into play.
The supporting cast is strong as well--the drawing instructor who is Laura's true love, Anne Catherick, the "Woman in White" who is Laura's near-twin in looks, but not class standing or mental dexterity, and who plays a central part in the vile fraud perpetrated by Glyde and his best friend Count Fosco, the stereotypical sinister Italian nobleman with odd personality tics and ties to organized crime.
Outside the plot, which was sensational in its day and is still sturdy enough to carry the modern reader's interest in the age of Hannibal Lector and Steven King, the book has much to say, both serious and humorous about the social and sexual conventions and mores of the time. For example, Marion is depicted as strong and independent--but still limited by her gender and unmarried status to being "protected" by the men around her--who would prefer her either dead (Sir Glyde) or in bed (Count Fosco). Laura, the nominal heroine of the story, is too dependent and passionless to be realistic, even in her day, which was part of Collin's point.
So I started this review by stating that Collins was Dickens's better at writing mystery and handling anger, and so he is, but this book still falls short of a classic. There is too much narrative, typical for writers (Dickens as well) of the time and resulting in 600+ pages that can be slow going at times, and a century and a half into the mystery genre Collins created, readers are usually a half step of ahead of him in the plot. Still, this is a worthy story well told by an author who deserves his own place outside the vast shadow of the Inimitable Dickens.
Loved It But For The End
I loved this book, well I loved the first five hundred and fifty pages anyway. The ending was a little bit of a disappointment to me.
I had been engrossed in this story for days and was looking forward to savoring the ending but I found myself being a bit disappointed by it. It felt tedious and over worked and a tad on the contrived side.
I think it would have been a better book without Count Fosco's account of events. I thought his account was a repetition of events and instead of finishing with a big bang it felt a little like a slow fizzle.
I was satisfied by the events that unfolded, though they were as I have said to a certain degree contrived and the ending was tied up rather neatly. It was the detailed and repetitive recounting of events that disappointed me.
I liked and hated the characters Collins created, but they were all either 'good guys' or 'bad guys', either friends and family of the victim or the people perpetrating the plot against her.
A book that I found to be similar yet more satisfying was 'Fingersmith' by Sarah Waters. You might like to try that if you enjoyed this.
