Walter Hartright a struggling drawing teacher, is walking at midnight back to Victorian London after visiting his widowed mother and sister at their cottage, in the suburbs to say goodbye, a quiet trip nobody around, the road empty everything's still, not even the leaves on the trees flicker in the blackness, nothing only his moving steps are heard, thinking about a lucrative job in a faraway county of England, that he reluctantly took ( he has a bad feeling about) because his friend Professor Pesca, a dwarf from Italy arranged it. Shock, something touches him out of the darkness... a ghostly, sick looking woman dressed all in white appears from the shadows, impossible this creature cannot be real... it speaks. A story unfolds, a young woman with a secret put in an insane asylum without being insane , a conspiracy to steal not only wealth but identity. Anne Catherick (The Woman in White) strangely resembles Laura Fairlie, one of two young ladies Mr. Hartright has been hired by her rich, unsocial invalid uncle Fredrick Fairlie, to teach watercolor painting, never mind that she and her half-sister Marian Halcombe have no talent, they need something to pass the time. Laura is very pretty, her sister is very intelligent but plain, but both are devoted to each other, a lonely life at Limmeridge House in Cumberland by the sea. Their uncle rarely sees them, quite fearful of his health a sick hypochondriac, ( kind of funny) not a man of feelings. A sudden love between Walter and Laura, ensues, the teacher and the student but her older wiser sister Marian doesn't approve, Laura is engaged to Sir Percival Glyde, 25 years her senior, a gentleman of seemingly good manners and taste a baronet, who her late father insisted she marry (men could do that then). Mr. Hartright is forced to leave the premises early, later traveling to the jungles of Central America to forget but doesn't, by Marian ( a event that she greatly regrets soon, and Laura more so), his three month employment shortened to two, Mr.Fairlie is not happy, why the puzzled man thinks can't people keep their promises anymore? The extremely obese, brilliant and mysterious Count Fosco, an Italian nobleman he says and good friend of Sir Percival, arrives with his wife Eleanor, she is the icy aunt of Laura and sister of Uncle Frederick, without any family affections. The Count loves animals but isn't fond of people, his pets are his best friends birds and white mice, he plays with, they adore him too. The Woman in White, sends an anonymous letter to the miserable Miss Fairlie, the future bride warning her that Glyde is not a good person. Anne is creeping about in the neighborhood, the Count and the Baronet are nervous , why? But the unhappy wedding day comes between Laura and Percival, that nobody wants but Sir Percival, he has a motive not love but wealth, she has money he has none. Predictably the couple travel across Europe, see many fascinating things on their long honeymoon and hate each other...Back in sweet England at the home of Sir Percival's, Blackwater Park, an appropriate name for the estate, in need of repairs the conspiracy goes forward, Laura and Marian are alone to battle him and the Count and his faithful wife, Eleanor the lurking Anne is still floating about, by the dismal lake nearby, something has to give soon. A wonderful novel from long ago, quite a mystery to be unraveled and one of the first written, still a superb read for fans of the genre, make that great literature.

An epic tale of love,betrayal,deception and revenge.

I generally don't read Victorian novels,but Wilkie Collins' masterpiece is among my favourite books. It is atmospheric,dark,complex and haunting. Despite its sheer length,I found it unputdownable. I liked it sufficiently,to read it all over again,a few years later.

The characters are memorable.There is the upright Walter Hartwright,who strives for justice, the beautful Laura Fairlie,the resourceful Marian Halcombe,the cunning Count Fosco,the unfortunate Anne Cathrick and the dishonest,Percival Glyde.

The technique is interesting. The story is told through mutiple narrators,letters and diary entries.
The sustained tension, superb characterization and a masterfully constructed plot make it memorable.
Fittingly,Wilkie Collins wanted his epitaph to read,"Author of the Woman in White,and other works of fiction."

I'm not sure what I can say about this book that hasn't been said already. It's fantastic, in every sense of the word.

Have you ever been interested to read a Victorian era "classic" but never got around to it because you are concerned that you may not be able to relate? This is the book for you.

If they had airports in the Victorian era this book would be a common sight. I mean this in a complimentary way, not equating Wilkie Collins with modern day blockbusting purveyors of crap like Stephenie Meyer or Dan Brown. This is an edge of the seat thriller that will soon have you forgetting that you reading something written over a century ago. The Woman in White is one of the earliest works of detective fiction and predates Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes by decades.

The Woman in White is not actually about the titular lady with her predilection for colorless attires, though she plays a significant part. The story is about two sisters (stop rolling your eyes back there! this is cool!) one beautiful, kind and vulnerable (OK, she is a bit lame) and the other not so pretty but tough as nails and sharp as a tack. Laura Fairlie (the pretty one) with her excessive niceness is ripe for exploitation and the dastardly handsome Sir Percival Glyde (to whom she is pledged) does not hesitate to do so at the first opportunity. To make matters worse he is aided and abetted by a smooth talking ingenious villain Count Fosco. At this point special mention must be made for two favorite characters from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum. Count Fosco must be one of the most formidable villains in literature, but what make him particularly interesting is his charm, humor, eccentricity and moments of goodness. Fortunately Laura has her own WMD in her half-sister Marian Halcombe, a totally badass Victorian lady who centuries later probably reincarnated as Ellen Ripley. Marian's strong character and resolution really shines through, she comes across as much more heroic than the novel's hero, Walter Hartright who is rather bland and almost useless.

Wilkie Collins has performed an amazing feat of character development in this book, Marian Halcombe and Count Fosco are so vivid they practically jump out of the book at you, you may want to stand well back while reading the book as a precaution. The plot twists and turns in unexpected manners and the final resolution is deeply satisfying. No lover of mystery novels should miss this classic. Beautifully written with very strong characterization, the Woman in White is more than a match to any modern day thriller.

Read this and the equally fabulous The Moonstone by the same author then brag about it to everybody until they start throwing things at you.

Πολύ πολύ καλό, με υπέροχη γραφή και ωραία ατμόσφαιρα στην Αγγλία του 1850!

Δύο αρνητικά για μένα...
Ένα ο όγκος του, πιστεύω ότι θα μπορούσε να παραλήψει αρκετά πράγματα και να ήταν μικρότερο, αν και την εποχή που εκδόθηκε έβγαινε σε συνέχειες οπότε αν ζούσα τότε θα το δικαιολογούσα!
Δεύτερον, το ότι πολλοί από τους χαρακτήρες είναι τόσο ευκολόπιστοι μπουμπούνες, που καταντάει γελοίο. Βέβαια ίσως πάλι εκείνη την εποχή να ήταν όντως τόσο ευκολόπιστοι...και μπουμπούνες!

4,5 αστεράκια

“The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, …”

“… The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!”

Marian Halcombe’s unbecoming features and distinct lack of beauty are offset with wit, intelligence, strength of character, bravura and courage, shrewdness, and loyalty. Laura Fairlie, her half-sister, by contrast, suffers a frail disposition and a weak, self-effacing, retiring personality but possesses a comely figure and undeniable facial beauty. Potential readers will not earn any insight points for guessing which one Walter Hartright falls in love with.

Late night on the road to Limmeridge House to undertake a contract as a drawing master, the previously mentioned Walter Hartright first encounters Anne Catherick, the eponymous woman in white, whom the reader learns is a mentally challenged young woman recently escaped from her commitment in an asylum. When he meets Laura and Marian, his student charges, the next day, Walter is shocked at the resemblance between Laura and the woman he had met and helped the previous night under such bizarre circumstances. Of course, notwithstanding their difference in class and Laura’s previous engagement to a wealthy local landowner baronet, Sir Percival Glyde, not to mention her melodramatic propensity for swooning, her heaving bosom and her Victorian tears, her sniffing at cologne and smelling salts, and her suffering from “back of the hand to the forehead” female illnesses, weaknesses, and bedroom confining headaches, Walter and Laura fall in love with each other. To avoid the likelihood of a certain scandal and the loss of reputation that would entail for Laura, Marion advises Hartright to leave Limmeridge House before the completion of his employment contract and he complies.

Shortly thereafter, Sir Percival Glyde, accompanied by his close friend, the outgoing, obsequiously charming, and spectacularly fat Count Fosco, (and his unaccountably surly and always subservient wife) arrives at Limmeridge House seeking to set a date for his contracted marriage to Laura. That arrival is overshadowed by the receipt of an anonymous letter warning Laura not to marry him under any circumstances. The plot begins to thicken quickly and one wonders whether a youthful Sherlock Holmes might have used his oft-repeated aphorism for the first time, “The game is afoot”!

If THE WOMAN IN WHITE were a modern novel (abundant servings of Victorian melodrama and sensation notwithstanding), it would be characterized as a psychological thriller based on criminal identity theft for financial gain. Gain to the tune of £30,000 to be more exact, which was an enormous fortune at the time. Walter Hartright’s and Marian Halcombe’s astute investigations to undercover the nature of the theft and its motives, and their legal machinations to restore the stolen identity to its rightful owner are exciting and compelling. Add in some thematic overtones of greed, misogyny, satire and political commentary on women’s legal rights in the mid-19th century, international spycraft, murder, fraud, adultery, and good old-fashioned criminal skullduggery blended with character development that is simply masterful in its depth and completeness, and it’s no wonder that THE WOMAN IN WHITE, first published in 1860, consistently ranks as one of the best English literature novels ever written and has never been out of print.

Highly recommended, I have no hesitation in adding THE WOMAN IN WHITE to my list of lifetime favourite novels.

Paul Weiss

A fully slowburn Victorian Dickensian mystery, one of those which you have to like the sound of the above to love this book

“This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”

n  n

Walter Hartright, his name is a tip off regarding his character, is walking down the street, his mind absorbed with his own problems, when suddenly:

”In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. 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, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.

‘Is that the road to London?’”

A damsel in distress is irresistible to most men, but impossible to ignore for men of good character. Hartright is still reeling from her ghostly appearance out of the gloom and dark of night, made more dramatic by her pale apparel. Before he can assemble his thoughts, she is in a carriage being spirited away. Men appear quickly behind her, whom he soon learns are chasing her. Hartright makes every effort to catch up with her to offer her further assistance, but does not find her.

”She has escaped from my asylum.”

Hartright is left with a mystery, but will soon discover that this mystery will become an obsession as the woman in white proves inexplicably to be tied to the woman he will fall in love with. He takes a job as a drawing master, instructing two half sisters as different as night and day. One is fair, and one is dark. One is pretty, and one is...well...unattractive. The word ugly is actually used, but once I learn of Marian Halcombe’s character, it is impossible to associate such a hideous word to such a lovely person.

Marian is brave, brilliant, and resourceful. In my opinion, one of the most interesting and fascinating women to appear in a Victorian novel. She becomes the pillar of strength for her sister, as well as for Hartright, as they are inescapably bound together against the machinations of men intent upon their destruction. Marian, we soon learn, can hold her own. “Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.”

Hartright, of course, falls in love with Laura Fairlie, the fair and beautiful one, an heiress, an orphan, a woman in need of protecting. Unfortunately, fate has conspired against them. She is promised to another one, the odious Sir Percival Glyde. Glyde is in serious financial trouble and needs her fortune to keep his creditors from dismantling his estate brick by brick. His closest friend is an Italian named Count Fosco, who conspires with him in a most insidious plot to take everything from Laura including, quite possibly, her own life.

n  n
Count “Never Missed a Meal” Fosco

I am a bit disappointed in Hartright. Laura is certainly in need of a white knight, but Marian would have been a woman to build a life with. He does love and respect Marian, but never sees her as a potential mate, even after he discovers that Laura will soon be unattainable. It is only a small disappointment. We all see ourselves from a very young age married to someone beautiful or handsome. Hartright, whose heart is always in the right place, is attracted to Laura’s beauty, but also to her vulnerability. Marian is neither pretty nor is she helpless.

The twist and turns to the plot are wonderfully revealed. This is considered one of the first detective novels as Hartright does apply investigative methods to his research while attempting to thwart the plans of Glyde and Fosco. Wilkie Collins’s background in studying the law also becomes readily apparent at different stages of the novel. The writing style is true Victorian style. I must caution you: if you are not a fan of Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope, you might find this novel difficult.

I read the book mostly late at night with the fireplace crackling and popping next to me. The wind has been blowing steadily the last few days, and as it moved along the gutters and through the bushes outside my window, it created sounds that made me snuggle deeper into my reading chair and feel as much as possible as if I were in England in the 1850s.

Collins does explore the idea of women’s rights. The law does not protect their rights in near the same fashion that it protects a man’s rights. A woman truly had to live by her wits to keep from being marginalized by the complete and nearly unassailable power of her husband or her father. Marian was a match for any man, but she needed much more than her intelligence to outflank the injustice and the discrimination under which she was forced to live.

Collins was a bohemian who did not believe in marriage. He had no qualms about living with more than one lover at once. I’m sure Dickens marvelled at his ability to pull of this feat in such a conservative time period. They were good friends, Dickens and Collins, but there was a break in their friendship towards the end of Dickens’ life when he was working on the novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ”his last and unfinished novel, with its running and hostile allusion to Collins’ The Moonstone.” I can’t think that Dickens was jealous. He was the champion among writers at the time. Collins fell out of favor over time while Dickens’ books soared. Only recently has Collins started to be regarded as one of the important Victorian writers.

n  n
The Dickens Family (and friends) in 1864 - (l-r)Charles Dickens, Jr., Kate Dickens, Charles Dickens, Miss Hogarth, Mary Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Georgina Hogarth

The Woman in White, as promised, does return to the plot, but you’ll have to read the book to discover exactly who she is, why she dresses in white, and what she has to do with the goings on at Limmeridge House? It is a chilling tale that must have elicited more than one gasp from the lips of Victorian women, young and old, as they discovered the truth behind the lies.

I must go now: “My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”

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'Double double toil and trouble'

3.5/5 stars rounded up to 4/5 stars

What was the most engaging, the truly unputdownable part of this mystery fiction for me?

Certainly the deepening secret about the eponymous Woman in White.
Undoubtedly, the writing of so minute atmospheric descriptions and the drawing of psychological portraits imbued with the scent of the passing of time, told from a distant future, pervading the text with unmistakable notes of nostalgy, and possibly regret concerning past events, now fatally come and impossible for the narrator to remedy.

All in all, I have been unaccountably more drawn in by the promise - or my personal interpretation thereof - than I was compelled by the development of the plot, its intricacies and the whole allure of detective story it vested later, rich in retellings, and fully developped subplots, and manuscripts quoted in manuscripts. I do love polyphonic novels usually, but as much as I relish reading epistolary stories, and though an avid reader of stories within stories, in the reading of this book, I discovered in me a natural cap not to be nonchalantly disregarded, under penalty of ominous groaning at the redundancy and sheer ungainliness of the whole matter :D

A clearing in the dreary bog of the development in the third to fourth quarter of the book would be the moment when the painter and main narrator Walter Hartright tries and collect evidence against the sinister Percival Glyde, discovering on his way to the church the extent and purposeful malevolence of the network of spies of the haughty baronet... It oddly reminded me of the climaxes in The Shadow over Innsmouth, Desperation or Adjustment Team when everything, be it potential or actual, proves to be another menace heaped on the hero.


Quotes:

'little did I think afterwards when our pleasant holiday had drawn to an end – that the opportunity of serving me for which my grateful companion so ardently longed was soon to come; that he was eagerly to seize it on the instant; and that by so doing he was to turn the whole current of my existence into a new channel, and to alter me to myself almost past recognition.'



'The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise.'



'It is easy to turn everything into ridicule [...] but you will not find it quite so easy, Count Fosco, to give me an instance of a wise man who has been a great criminal.'
The Count shrugged his huge shoulders, and smiled on Laura in the friendliest manner.
'Most true!' he said. 'The fool's crime is the crime that is found out [...]. If I could give you an instance, it would not be the instance of a wise man.'


'I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong.'


'I have always cultivated a feeling of humane indulgence for foreigners. They do not possess our blessings and advantages, and they are, for the most part, brought up in the blind errors of Popery. It has also always been my precept and practice [...] to do as I would be done by. On both accounts I will not say that Mrs Rubelle struck me as being a small, wiry, sly person of fifty or thereabouts [...].'


'4. THE NARRATIVE OF THE TOMBSTONE'

[verbatim!]


'From that self-imposed exile I came back, as I had hoped, prayed, believed I should come back – a changed man. In the waters of a new life I have tempered my nature afresh. In the stern school of extremity and danger my will had learnt to be strong, my heart to be resolute, my mind to rely on itself. I had gone out to fly from my own future. I came back to face it, as a man should.'


Similar readings:

Fiction:
Wuthering Heights
The Turn of the Screw
La sombra del viento
The Secret Agent
Le Père Goriot
Преступление и наказание
The Caretaker


Non-fiction:
The Republic
Natural Right and History

My friend Nora Ephron suggested i read this. Okay, I don't know her, but I feel like she'd be a friend. Therefore I honored her recommendations.

In her collection of essays "I Feel Bad about my Neck," she includes a bit about books that have completely transported her. She says it better than I do about this wonderful mystery:

"I open Wilkie Collins's masterpiece, The Woman in White, probably the first great work of mystery fiction ever written (although that description hardly does it justice), and I am instantly lost to the world. Days pass as I savor every word. Each minute I spend away from the book pretending to be interested in everyday life is a misery. How could I have waited so long to read this book? When can I get back to it? Halfway through I return to New York to work, to mix a movie, and I sit in the mix studio unable to focus on anything but whether my favorite character in the book will survive. I will not be able to bear it if anything bad happens to my beloved Marian Halcombe. Every so often I look up from the book and see a roomful of people waiting for me to make a decision about whether the music is too soft or the thunder is too loud, and I can't believe they don't understand that what I'm doing is much more important—I'm reading the most wonderful book."

For what it's worth, my husband really enjoyed it, too.

“The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”

The joy of re-visiting an old favourite! I’ve read this novel four times now, studied it at uni, and each time it delighted me. The contemporary public was enthralled too, to the point that even Victorian advertising companies used this ‘fad’ to sell many wares, resulting with The Woman in White appearing everywhere. And would you be surprised to hear that many gentlemen asked to marry Ms Halcome? I love this anecdote - both that fiction became reality for many and that it was Marian who stole the heart of people! But I’m jumping ahead of myself.

For all instances and purposes, Collins crafted a real page-turner. Opting for a narration composed of a multitude of first person narratives in the form of letters, journal entries and testimonies, he was able to create suspense, urgency and confusion, at turns witholding key pieces of information and adjusting the pace as he saw fit. This was also to mimic a court of justice where the readers became judges and investigators, trying to solve the various mysteries, and added a sense of veracity to the text. Collins, following the motto of “make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait”, knew how to catch and keep the attention of his public. He furthermore used many elements of the gothic and melodrama, but in an innovative way that led to the creation of a new school of fiction, that of the novel of sensation.

Our author however didn’t just experiment with the form, he also challenged many notions, such as the role of women in society, marriage, family, and gender expectations, voicing the contemporary anxieties of a new mass society
Laura Fairlie, the stereotyped angel at home, beautiful, voiceless and passive, is the ‘perfect’ heroine, and yet, it is Marian Halcombe, resourceful, masculine, intelligent, courageous, active, who takes the heart of the readers. Count Fosco, super-villain, is portrayed with feminine features, such as sensitivity, and glamourized. Mr. Fairlie is a caricature of feminised position. Even Walter Hartright, who goes from being a drawing-master, equivalent to a male governess, to hero and wage earner, still behaves often in a feminine, insecure fashion. He also is the controlling authority, and although he professes to let the witnesses speak for themselves, he often takes the role of narrator, taking away Marian’s voice, and not letting Laura have one. All are challenging gender assumptions. The notion of identity is at the core of the novel. Its vulnerability is illustrated through the main plot which revolves around the destruction and recovery of the heroine’s identity. It shows control over the female self. Sir Glyde, who wants Laura’s fortune and Anne’s silence, tries to take their identities and confine them to asylums, underlining the powerlessness of (married) women in front of the law. Additionally, the character of Anne Catherick represents madness, or the loss of self. . By placing the action in a domestic, recognizable, setting and using a realistic treatment with no supernatural elements, Collins highlighted the illusory nature of appearances and brought danger into the heart of Victorian homes. While seemingly returning order to the social fabric, he allowed his rebelling nature to come to the fore and made his readership question the very value of this ‘order’ the end is a veritable ‘ménage à trois’, which echoes Collins’s own life to a certain extent.

I could go on and on (I did say it is one of my favourites after all!)... Ultimately, The Woman in White is a brilliant thriller, inciting you to keep turning the pages to find out what is going on, and offering the world two of the most compelling characters ever (Marian and Fosco, of course) :0)