The Woman in White

"I love reading mysteries to unwind — it’s my equivalent of watching TV — and I have to admit, i have read a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot — sometimes even two in one day (Don’t tell my husband, who finds my habit frustrating). I have interviewed some of my favourite mystery writer s for this site, and I really love their books. But I admit that, again like TV, there’s very few books in the genre that give lasting satisfaction. At the same time, my preference when it comes to novels in general is pre-20th century. I just have more time for voices speaking from the past than I do contemporary fiction authors. This is perhaps why, for me, The Woman in White is the perfect book. I love the plot, I love the characters, I love the settings, I just absolutely adore it. If you haven’t read it yet, I envy you, that you still have that experience in life ahead of you. After I read it, I proceeded to read almost everything Wilkie Collins — who was a friend of Charles Dickens ’s — wrote. The Moonstone is as good as The Woman in White , Armadale is still well worth reading. After that, there are still some good things here and there, but it may be worth exercising a bit more restraint than I did…."

"Yes. It’s credited with being the beginning of the whole genre of suspense. That’s why I picked it. I’ve only read it twice, but it’s lingered in my consciousness: the images and the feel of it. He really is a master of the tricks. I read somewhere that there are 40 cliffhangers in it—he sort of invented the cliffhanger. And I like the Russian doll structure of all the different accounts. You gradually lift off each little doll’s body and find another plot strand and another secret. I love that. It’s very cleverly done. “I read somewhere that there are 40 cliffhangers in it” He was criticised for being more of a craftsman than a genius but actually, in some ways, there is an element of genius to being a great craftsman. There are some really big, moving, emotional scenes—like when he’s at the grave and thinks he’s saying goodbye and then there she is. And the exploration of identity is fascinating. I think it’s often the way, that these books have an unstable identity theme which I am really interested in. That’s the huge thing about The Woman in White —who is she? Who she is changes and you’re constantly wrong-footed as a reader. That’s a theme across suspense books and I find it fertile and interesting. I think there is an element, again, of suspense here. When you’re working with archetypal fears, it feels so real. There are always those fears that a loved one will die and then that moment where the loved one has died but then comes back to life—effectively, that’s answering a deep need inside all of us to feel that death might not be final. That’s why the really successful novels, the ones that will last, often have themes that answer these deep human needs. It’s easy to dismiss these suspenseful, thriller, psychological books as being plot-driven or a bit of frippery but, actually, the really good ones have very profound human themes that reach out to you across centuries and still matter now. And they’re done so well that those themes can emerge powerfully. Yes, and you know that, if it’s good, you’re in for a nail-biting experience—that you will start to really care about what’s happening. It will alarm you. You will get to the end and you’ll survive. There’s a certain pattern that you know you’re going to go through. Ultimately, that’s rather reassuring."

"Where do you start with the story of The Woman in White ? What do you do with a novel that has so many strange characters? How do you even begin to define its plot? One of the big debates surrounding this novel, and sensation fiction more generally, is what the relationship between plot and character is in a novel like this. Is plot the thing that drives you along “as though by steam”—as some contemporary reviewers would say—or do you get captivated by the characters? Some say realistic characters get subordinated by the energy of the plot. “I’ve read this novel I don’t know how many times, taught it for seven years, and its plot still eludes me” I’ve read this novel I don’t know how many times, and taught it for at least seven years, and its plot is still something that eludes me. It’s got holes in it, I’m not sure if this person went there first, or if that happened first. But I remember Count Fosco, Marian Halcombe, Walter Hartright, Anne Catherick: the encounter on the high road at the beginning of the novel. There are so many set-pieces and scenes and idiosyncrasies of personality. That’s what keeps me coming back to this novel. They’re not realistic characters in the way George Eliot would give us, not deep psychological portraits. There’s no omniscient narrator who can penetrate their minds in the way the realist novels gives us. The novel is told to us by a number of narrators—Walter Hartright, Marian Halcombe, Fosco—almost every three chapters they’re switching. The glory of it is you get this story as if it’s a court hearing, everybody is presenting their evidence from their own particular perspectives. Yes. He was not the first person to tell a story with more than one narrator. Dickens had done it with Bleak House in 1853, but he only uses two (an omniscient narrator and Esther Somerson), whereas Collins throws everybody at you: minor characters, people who appear only to tell their tiny bit of the story. It’s something he’ll use again and again throughout his career. Very influenced – he made a point of this in all of the prefaces that deal with a particular point of law: Armadale, The Woman in White, Man and Wife . He wanted to position himself in relation to contemporary legal decisions, in relation to newsworthy stories. One of the things behind novels like The Woman in White was the sensational murder accounts of the time of the novel’s writing. I think he was interested in it and, like many people of his time, he was aware that the legislation protecting women within and outside of marriage was not sufficient, that it’s very easy to silence a woman on very spurious grounds. She could be deemed mentally ill or ‘hysterical’ and quite easily put — through a small payment — into a private asylum and locked away forever. On the surface the novel seems to be a story whereby the trials and tribulations of Laura Fairly are resolved at the end, because Marian Halcombe and Walter Hartright have saved her. But by the end of the novel she’s such a shadow of her former self she might as well be the institutionalised Anne Catherick with whom she was confused. At the end it seems as though Marian Halcombe, the odd, ugly woman of the novel, has endeared herself to both the readers and to Walter to such an extent that the real relationship might be theirs. Laura is this kind of invalid for whom they care. Readers used to write in to him and say, “Who’s the model for her, where can I meet her?” They thought of Collins as a kind of dating agency."