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Author: Wilkie Collins
Name of the book: The Woman in White
Language: English
Genre: Mystery novel, the Sensation novel
About the Author
William Wilkie Collins was an English
novelist and playwright knew for The Woman in White and for The Moonstone,
which has been posited as the first modern English detective novel.
Book Review
“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what Man’s resolution can achieve.”
The Woman in White is one of those books
that I am kicking myself for not reading sooner! The first ‘sensationalist’
novel in Victorian England, The Woman in White is considered one of the
earliest examples of crime fiction. It was originally published in serial form
in Charles Dickens’s magazine All The Year Round.
The Woman in White is one of those classic Victorian novels can either bore you to tears or, as in this case, delight you with a fast-paced plot and great characterizations.
I’m sure many
of you are familiar with Gothic-style fiction, and The Woman in White, though
written some forty years after that fad, carries elements of a Gothic romance
that even Ann Radcliffe would have approved of. It is a work describing great
passion between two people and the travails they must go through to secure a
true romance.
The story is an early example of a detective fiction with protagonist Walter Hartright employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives. The use of multiple narrators (including nearly all the principal characters) draws on Collins’s legal training, and as he points out in his preamble.
“The story here presented will
be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offense against the laws is
told in Court by more than one witness”. In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The
Observer listed The Woman in White number 23 in “the top 100 greatest novels of all time”, and the novel was listed at number 77 on the BBC’s survey The Big
Read.
The novel famously begins with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter with The Woman in White on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairley and her half-sister Marian Halcombe, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his friend Count Fosco.
The ‘charming’ Count Fosco has a taste for
vanilla bonbons, white mice, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and
insanity along the corridors of English country houses, The Woman in White is a
blend of Gothic horror and psychological thriller.
The Woman in White is a long read, but very rewarding. It is densely plotted with a memorable cast of characters. The reader will fall in love with the intelligent and resourceful Marian.
When in In the middle of the novel, Marian tells Laura that “our endurance must end and our resistance begins,” it feels like a feminist principle and Collins gives us the perfect metaphor for liberation when Marian sheds her Victorian clothing for breaches and cloak so that she may safely climb the roof to eavesdrop on her enemies.
She is brave and becomes a pillar of strength to her sister. In my
opinion, she is one of the most fascinating women to appear in Victorian
Literature. Count Fosco is another fantastic character in this novel. He is
cunning, intelligent, and extremely evil. He is certainly one of the most
fascinating and dangerous villains in detective fiction.
The writing in The Woman in White is
quintessentially Victorian. If you are not a fan of Charles Dickens or Henry
James, you might find this book difficult to finish. The twists and turns are
wonderfully revealed though I found the ending a little disappointing. Wilkie Collin’s
background in Law also becomes evident at different stages in the novel.
Collins has also explored the idea of women’s rights in this novel.
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Critical reception
The novel was extremely successful
commercially, but contemporary critics were generally hostile. Modern critics
and readers regard it as Collins’s best novel: a view with which Collins
concurred, as it is the only one of his novels named in his chosen epitaph:
“Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction”.
The Woman in White is a dark and chilling
tale and I mostly read it in the rainy evenings. It made me snuggle deeper in
my bed and feel as if I were in England in the 1850s. I enjoyed it immensely
and I highly recommend The Woman in White to readers who like a dark,
atmospheric and moody story and to fans of crime fiction. You won’t be
disappointed.
My Ratings for this book: 4/5
You can easily order a copy of it from
Amazon- The Woman in White
Written By - Violet Priscilla S
Edited By - Anamika Malik
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