A daily review of books worth your time
More like this
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
A midnight encounter with a terrified woman in white pulls a young drawing-master into a conspiracy of stolen identity and asylums. Collins invented the sensation novel here, and it still grips like a vise.
The Review
Wilkie Collins opens The Woman in White with one of the most famous scenes in Victorian fiction: a young drawing-master walking home at night when a hand falls on his shoulder and he turns to find a woman dressed entirely in white, alone, frightened, and fleeing something she will not name. From that single uncanny image Collins unspools an intricate Gothic thriller of mistaken identity, forced marriage, false imprisonment, and a villain so charming you half forgive him while he ruins lives. Published in 1859, it more or less invented the sensation novel, the lurid, suspenseful, secret-laden form that taught popular fiction how to keep readers up past midnight, and its machinery has aged remarkably little.
Collins's masterstroke is structure. He tells the story through a sequence of narrators, each contributing the portion they witnessed, as though the reader were assembling testimony in a legal case. This not only builds suspense by controlling exactly what we know and when, it also gives us the novel's two greatest creations. Marian Halcombe, plain, brilliant, and braver than any man in the book, is one of the finest heroines of the era, and her sections crackle with intelligence. And Count Fosco, the corpulent, soft-spoken, canary-loving mastermind, is among the great villains in English literature, terrifying precisely because he is so genial. The contest between Marian and Fosco is the book's beating heart.
The plot turns on a conspiracy to rob a woman of her identity, her fortune, and her freedom, and Collins wrings genuine dread from the period's real horrors: the ease with which an inconvenient woman could be declared mad and locked away, the legal helplessness of wives, the way wealth and respectability could mask atrocity. There is detective work here long before the detective novel was codified, with the heroes painstakingly gathering proof against an enemy protected by law and reputation. The Gothic atmosphere, crumbling estates, midnight churchyards, the ever-present sense of watched and hunted, is laid on with confidence and never tips into mere decoration.
Readers coming from modern thrillers should expect a more expansive pace and a Victorian fondness for coincidence and elaborate explanation. But the suspense is real, the pages turn, and the central mystery of who the woman in white actually is, and how her fate binds to that of an heiress she resembles, pays off completely. More than a century and a half on, this remains a model of how to braid Gothic menace, social outrage, and pure plot into something irresistible. It is long, but it never feels its length once Fosco arrives, and few books have so thoroughly earned their reputation for keeping readers up past midnight. Collins effectively built the chassis that every later thriller would refine, and reading the original is a reminder of how thrilling those moves were before they hardened into formula. Give it the first hundred pages and it will not give you back your evenings.
Reviewed by Quinn
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.