The Woman in White | Book Review

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

569 pages

Paperback

Penguin Books

1868

ISBN: 9780140420245

Review

‘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 heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments…’

Walter Hartright, walk along a lonely, moonlit road are disrupted by his meeting a distressed figure, clad entirely in white. What seems at first to be a coincidental encounter is placed into uneasy context when Hartright takes up his duties at drawing master to half-sisters Marian Halcombe and the beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie. The thin, worried woman in white will prove to be the link between Laura and those determined to wrest her fortune from her.

‘The Woman in White’ is often cited as one of the first mystery novels and is epistolary fiction at its finest. We go through numerous narrators, Hartright (he must be a goody with a surname like that, right?) most prominent amongst them, with the plot cleverly revealed to us step-by-step.

I read some reviews which stated that the novel was anachronistic and (that least insightful of critiques) ‘boring’. It is certainly of its time, but its being published in serialised format meant that Collins leaves us with a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter more often than not. The plot has a superb macro story arc, with lots of sub-plots for the reader to get their teeth into. I was not in the least bored and I wondered whether it was the book’s relatively lengthy page count which proved prohibitive to some.

The characters are superb, from the no-nonsense Marian and the hypochondriac Frederick Fairlie, to the wonderfully embittered and venomous Mrs Catherick. These are such wonderfully drawn side characters (Marian perhaps does not merit being a side character only) that they threaten to make Walter and Laura seem rather bland by comparison. Our antagonists are also superb – the hot-tempered Sir Percival, the conniving and obsequious Countess Fosco, and the dark and scheming Count Fosco. Battle lines are drawn early in the novel and it is thrilling to watch the chaos ensue.

It being a nineteenth century novel, there is a healthy dose of fainting, turns, and nervous conditions. The novel also perpetuates the theory that a woman in a dress cannot be caught in a rain shower without developing a life-threatening fever. One gets the sense that when ‘The Woman in White’ was written, these were not such ragged tropes, and one happily reads along with the contrivance with this in mind.

To set alongside the fainting, Collins takes us down a less-trodden route – high-born ladies reduced to relative poverty. Hartright, Halcombe, and Fairlie turn slum detectives in a bid to uncover Fosco’s terrible secret, and this makes for the most thrilling part of the book. Hartright ducks and weaves through crowded streets in an attempt to bring the count down, hired thugs only a step behind him.

This is one of the best epistolary novels I’ve read – highly recommended.

*Thanks for reading. Image courtesy of World of Books. Find my other reviews below*

Hilary Mantel – Mantel Pieces

Kevin Barry – The Heart in Winter

Lauren Oyler – No Judgement

George Mackay Brown – A Time to Keep

Sarah Moss – Summerwater

Stephen King – 11.22.63

Damon Galgut – The Promise

Francine Toon – Pine

Robert Winder – Bloody Foreigners

P. G. Wodehouse – Very Good, Jeeves

Michael Palin – Erebus: The History of a Ship

Hilary Mantel – The Mirror and the Light

Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet

Raynor Winn – The Salt Path

Samantha Harvey – The Western Wind

Diarmaid MacCulloch – Thomas Cromwell: A Life

Peter Carey – A Long Way from Home

W.C. Ryan – A House of Ghosts

Val McDermid – A Place of Execution

Richard Cohen – How to Write Like Tolstoy

George Orwell – 1984

John Sampson – The Wind on the Heath

Michelle Paver – Wakenhyrst

Jess Smith – Way of the Wanderers

Zadie Smith – Feel Free

Max Hastings – Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975

Bernard MacLaverty – Grace Notes

Ernest Hemingway – In Our Time

Andrew Roberts – Napoleon the Great

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale

Kamila Shamsi – Home Fire

Annie Proulx – Brokeback Mountain

Anthony Doerr – All the Light We Cannot See

Ellipsis: Three magazine

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

Jon McGregor – Reservoir 13

Colson Whitehead – The Underground Railroad

Amor Towles – A Gentleman in Moscow

---

Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.