"We dont want genius in this country, unless it is
accompanied by respectability." Collins packs wit into
a mystery that Smart Aleck Woollcott called one of the best
written. He surely appreciated the teasing ironies.
Meantime, there's delicato Laura w odious husby and his
nasty accomplice Count Fosco who want to rob her of
property and destroy her identity. If only Laura's
tenacious couz Marian had a cellphone...

Altogether, a stately instance of monstrous romance/deception that salutes the mask without the face behind it.

Υπέροχο βιβλίο,συναρπαστικό και εξαιρετικά ευκολοδιάβαστο.Παρά τον όγκο του το τελείωσα σε λίγες μέρες αφού με έκανε να μην θέλω να το αφήσω πριν φτάσω στη λύση του μυστηρίου.

Maybe 4.5. It's not a perfect novel but it is a really great read.

I want to say upfront that I am a fan of Victorian writing. Wordy, in the right hands, works for me. And Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens have the right hands! Their words unfurl like the petals of a flower, and at the heart you are presented with a gem: an exquisite observation about humanity, or a marvelous witticism. They were true wordsmiths, and I would hotly contest any need to "edit" their works.

Once we passed the exposition and started climbing plot graph mountain toward the climax, I was hooked. This is the second Collins' I have read, and both times I experienced moments when I feared that the plot was going to devolve into simple Gothic melodrama, laughable by our modern standards of mystery. Each time, I was wrong. Sure, the dated nature of the novel is evident in the behavior of some of the characters. They are so innocent--and by innocent, I mean gullible! They are so trusting, and accept everyone at their word; but then, what choice did they really have? How would you go about checking someone's credentials back then, especially on a moment's notice? There were times, though, when I did roll my eyes--the villain assures a character that he is nice, so the character smiles and relaxes. Surely he must be nice if he says he is! This happens several times. Also, a character discovers, through a slip by the villain, that vital evidence is hidden in a location, and the character retires to the inn for the night, planning to search the location the next day. I want to yell, "Go there tonight! Don't give them time to retrieve the information before you!" Of course, he doesn't listen to me. Aside from these few flaws, I found the plot line intriguing and unpredictable.

There are two unforgettable characters--Count Fosco and Marian Holcombe, or "the magnificent Marian," as the Count refers to her. This is one point on which the Count and I agree. Intelligent, resourceful, courageous, quick-witted--she is a force to be reckoned with. Despite all this and a rocking hot bod, she is plain (ugly is the word that is used), so apparently matrimony is out of the question. Victorian men are not too bright, evidently. Marian is content to devote her life to her younger sister, Laura, who is the antithesis of her sister: one of those pallid, trembly, whispery creatures who flinches at every noise and never has an original thought. She is, however, quite pretty. When the attractive young drawing master arrives at Limmeridge, guess who he falls in love with? Of course, Laura never does or says anything to merit this, while Marian is being charming and vivacious all over the place. I was afraid, for awhile, that Laura was the Collins equivalent of Lucie Manette, and she would be weeping and fainting for the entirety of the book. In the middle of the book, she does grow a backbone and actually defies her husband several times. Later, however, she endures a couple of months in an asylum and this almost destroys her sanity. Now, this is a private asylum for wealthy people and there's no mention of abuse, but her reason is seriously affected. I guess the flower of womanhood were really like flowers back then--delicate hothouse flowers.

This is where I really had a problem with Walter. He has been adventuring in Central America, trying to forget his hopeless love. When he meets Laura again, after a year apart, she is literally like a child. She speaks like a child and spends all her time drawing terrible pictures. Walter and Marian are united in their determination to right her wrongs and bring justice to Sir Percival and the Count. Caring for Laura and plotting against their enemies throws them closely together, but does he recognize that Marian is worth one hundred of her sister? Of course not! He loves Marian as a sister, while reserving all his passion for the complete absence of personality that is Laura.

Count Fosco is a superb villain--witty, urbane, and keenly intelligent. He alone has the great good sense to recognize the "sublime" qualities of "the magnificent Marian." This alone endears him to me. He is ruthless and self-serving, but immensely likable, all the same. Underneath his charm, he has the soul of a cobra. The cobra has a weakness, though, and it is his admiration for Marion. Despite the fact that he knows what a formidable opponent she is and that she could actually succeed in foiling his plans, he cannot bring himself to allow any harm to come to her. When she is dangerously ill, he fights against the doctor himself in order to save her life, even though her death would have removed a major obstacle from his path. Dickens is famed for his memorable characters, but with these two characters, Collins has created two people--complex individuals who will remain with his readers long after they have finished the book.

All in all, this is an engrossing read with some superbly drawn characters. I highly recommend for anyone who doesn't turn pale and tremble like a Victorian heroine at the sight of a book over 300 pages!

*** 12/04/17 Update ***
Just finished leading a group discussion over this book with the Victorians. It was so much fun! I greatly enjoyed sharing the reading experience with my group. This second reading didn't really change any of my previous opinions, but rather, reinforced them. I still have a fondness for Count Fosco and still think Walter is a schmuck for not choosing Marian over Laura, but it remains a great read!

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.

Hay que tener paciencia con Wilkie Collins, pero, al final, te deja un buen sabor de boca.
Dicen que Collins es el precursor de la novela negra y, en cierta manera, se nota en sus libros.
No me apasionó todo el entramado amoroso, pero los personajes son de una profundidad enorme. Hace tiempo que lo leí y sigo acordándome de ellos. Un clásico imprescindible.

You have to be patient with wilkie Collins, but in the end it leaves a good taste in your mouth.
They say Collins is the forerunner of the crime novel and, in a way, you can see it in his books.
I wasn't passionate about the whole love network, but the characters are of enormous depth. I've been reading it for a long time and I still remember them. An indispensable classic.

DNF 30%
Odkładam, ale na pewno wrócę, bo mi się podobała. Po prostu za bardzo rozwlekłam jej czytanie...

Finally! I was able to read a classic after so long! The story is remarkable, and I loved it right from the get-go, but after a certain point, I felt bogged down by the length. I didn’t mind much at first, since I remembered a friend mentioning how the older that she gets, the more she prefers to savor her books. That was a good reminder for me, and I was savoring it for quite a while. It got boring after a certain point. I’m not sure how necessary it was to stretch it out for that long. However, I have read that this book was written in weekly installments. Perhaps that was the reason for the length and all the details.

I loved how there were multiple characters doing the narration. Although I thought that Laura was lacking in depth and character, Marion was hands-down my absolute favorite.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“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.”

“No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.”

“Silence is safe.”

WOW! What a great book! It's 3 in the morning and I really needed sleep but I just couldn't put this book down until I finished it. So well written with so many twists and turns. I just loved it and would recommend it to all.

I had heard of this novel but knew nothing about it. This was not the novel I was expecting. It is melodrama of the highest order and one can tell it was a serialised work as Collins throws everything into the mix. Escapees from lunatic asylums, dopple-gangers, fake nurses, druggings, debt, suspicious foreigners, thwarted love, kidnappings, and baddies that are so cliched they twiddle their moustaches. It’s a lot to cram in, even given it’s 600 pages long.

It rattles along at such a pace that it is only after I finished it I had time to realise how much of it irritated me. I know it is a novel of its time and one must expect the portrayal of women to be different but Collins comes perilously close to having a strong, autonomous female character that is also attractive to men but then gets cold feet and makes her too ugly to be a romantic lead. Not only is it disappointing but it also undermines the foundation of the novel. The artist Walter Hartright (who is employed over a summer to teach Marian and her half sister Laura watercolour painting) spends most of the novel extolling the virtues of Marian, declaiming her intelligence, wit and bravery. She is the one he confides in, the one he is honest with and yet he claims to be hopelessly in love and desirous to marry the insubstantial void that is Laura, albeit it a prettily packaged one. The only person that Marian is entitled to receive lustful or romantic interest from is the comically obese, foreigner Count Fosco – a man who is portrayed as having some strange fetishes such as enjoying having white mice run over his body and repeatedly kissing his pet birds and I visualised as the Go Compare opera singer which was really rather distracting.

Yes ladies, if you are a bit too tall, a bit too dark and haven’t bleached your ‘tache in a while a life of spinsterhood or marriage to a man who you can’t stretch your arms around is your future.

Of course the thrust of the story is the evil Sir Percival Glyde having a secret that the titular character knows and his desire to get his debt-ridden mitts on his wife Laura’s fortune. However, the big reveal of his secret has lost its shock value with the passage of time and discovering it led to a big, fat meh on my part.

There are some pockets of great writing such as this expose of hypocrisy towards criminality,

n  “Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in, at the end of his career, a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career? When John-Howard-Philanthropist wants to relieve misery, he goes to find it in prisons, where crime is wretched – not in huts and hovels, where virtue is wretched too…
Which gets on best, do you think, of two starving dressmakers – the woman who resists temptation, and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of the second woman’s fortune- it advertises her from length to breadth of good-humoured, charitable England- and she is relieved, as the breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as the keeper of it.”n

There are also moments of humour, which are genuinely funny and come almost exclusively from the bizarre figure of the girls’ uncle Frederick Fairlie, a man incredibly wealthy but too much of a hypochondriac to enjoy it. On meeting the Count he writes this,

n  ” My first inquiries were for the Count. Had we really got rid of him? Yes- he had gone away by the afternoon train. Had he lunched; and, if so, upon what? Entirely upon fruit-tart and cream. What a man! What a digestion!”n

And showing how great the class divide between masters and servants he is bemused by his interaction with a female servant,

n  “ The Young Person’s face became more unfinished than eve; and, I think she began to cry. I certainly saw something moist about her eyes. Tears or perspiration? Louis (whom I have just consulted) is inclined to think, tears. He is in her class of life; and he ought to know best.”n

For all its failings it is an enjoyable read though perhaps excluding the strange ending that borders on ridiculous and appears to be included merely to re-introduce a character given some significance in the beginning and forgotten throughout the rest of the story. Perhaps a case of what worked in serialisation needing to be tightened up for novel form.

Walter Hartright es un profesor de dibujo, que de paseo nocturno, de vuelta de de visitar a su madre y a su hermana, se topa una mujer vestida toda de blanco, de aspecto fantasmagórico y enfermizo, que le pide le acompañe a una dirección y no le haga preguntas.
Comienza así una historia donde el joven profesor, ante las necesidades económicas accede a dar clases de pintura a dos jóvenes hermanastras, la pequeña de gran parecido con la mujer con la que se topó la noche pasada. Se establece así el misterio del parecido entre las dos mujeres, el pasado de la joven, un matrimonio concertado con nefastas intenciones, y la relación entre el futuro marido, el tío, el padre, un italiano, la masonería y por supuesto las dos hermanastras y el profesor de pintura, además de otros personajes que son importantes porque serán los que cuenten algunos retazos de la historia.

Me gustaría destacar dos detalles importantes, la estructura, está contada en forma epistolar, de diario, testimonios y notas por los personajes allegados a la trama principal hace que tengas distintos puntos de vista del mismo hecho y al mismo tiempo ir avanzando en el misterio y encajando el rompecabezas para resolverlo. Y en segundo lugar los temas que trata, deja muchas frases memorables del feminismo, de la desigualdad de la mujer, de las herencias, de los derechos de sobre ellas, la infidelidad, la traición y la lealtad.

Una novela que da inicio a las novelas de misterio muy recomendable.

Originally published in a weekly periodical between late 1859 and 1860 as a serial story, this is believed to be the first English crime detection novel. This is Victorian fiction that combines romance, mystery and Gothic horror with a psychological twist.


The story opens with an eerie encounter, in the dead of night on a moonlit London road.


In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop… There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth…stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white.

Collins had me at hello. This is the story of what a woman’s patience can endure, and what a man’s resolution can achieve. I loved the fly on the wall perspective of events as revealed through a series of narrators, starting with Walter Hartright, drawing master of the time and place, who introduced me to Marian Halcombe thusly;

The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well developed, yet not fat; her head sat on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of man, for it occupied it’s natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window – and I said to myself, 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 knows who she is, personally and as a woman in Victorian society. She reflects these qualities and embraces society’s expectations with elegance and grace, deftly, slowly, surely and quite successfully disarming her male audience and the reader with her charming, disarming, demeanour that both mirrors and ever so subtly mocks those expectations. Never have I been so invested in a character. I adore and applaud her. She is simply one of the most deftly drawn, beautiful and complex renderings I have ever encountered in the written word.

Without a doubt it is Collins characters that both support and propel this story, each in their own unique voice, of which Marian is but one. All brilliantly drawn and cleverly revealed as time goes by. It is a classic, therefore it is wordy, with long drawn out, highly descriptive sentences that go on and on and on as they slowly, persistently tug you forward.

No matter! I lapped up every word.