‘Sensation fiction’ or just sensational?
The Woman in White: A book review
The road that led to The Woman in White and the writing of Wilkie Collins passed through the deep, dark netherworld of Dan Simmons’ Drood. It’s funny how literary discoveries sometimes work.
Drood, a 2010 bestseller with a great cover, was a murder mystery narrated by a fictional version of Collins, the Victorian novelist and friend of Charles Dickens. According to the book jacket, the novel “explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the author’s last years and may provide the key to his final, unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
I skipped past Collins during my university English literature reading days and through the decades since then so I figured I owe it to Simmons and me to get acquainted with the writer before digging into that big block of a book, Drood.
Thankfully, the literary journey through that other big book —Collins’ The Woman in White — was a joyous discovery.
Despite the fact that his novel has been in print since its 1859 publication, Wilkie Collins isn’t a household literary name. Certainly not like Dickens.
On Medium, there are scant mentions of the author and The Woman in White and few articles that go into any depth. One of them calls the novel an example of the genre of “sensation fiction” and dismisses it as something well below the level of literary fiction —a work for bored housewives apparently.
“The writing is often sub par, the foreshadowing tends to be only slightly less subtle than a sledgehammer to the face, and plots are fairly predictable,” Nora Summer wrote dismissively.
That does a great disservice to Collins’ talent and to the intelligence and tastes of millions of readers, but then high-minded critics have been saying the same thing of Stephen King for years.
What surprised me about The Woman in White is how modern it reads and the inventiveness of its narration.
Dickens’ can be very difficult to read and his writing often overwrought; Collins, in comparison, is stripped down and unadorned for a Victorian. Just compare these two descriptive passages from the two literary counterparts:
Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens wrote in his seasonal classic A Christmas Carol, was a “… squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”
Compare that to Collins’ description of the titular character when we first meet her:
“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.”
The various narrative perspectives of The Woman in White are textbook examples of well-crafted fiction.
Collins presents the story from the viewpoint of several characters, men and women and from different classes and cultures. Each voice is convincing and pitch perfect, each character carries the story along to its satisfying conclusion.
Although it’s not a novel of ideas, The Woman in White also presents several themes that readers are left to ponder.
For instance, the nature of good and evil. Laura Fairlie, the woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Woman in White and Anne Catherick who becomes Lady Glyde after her marriage to the notorious Sir Percival Glyde, have an interesting exchange with Count Fosco at one point in the novel:
“I have always heard that truly wise men are truly good men, and have a horror of crime,” she says.
To which her sinister husband responds, with Scrooge-like disgust:
“‘Stand to your guns, Laura’,” sneered Sir Percival, who had been listening in his place at the door. “‘Tell him next, that crimes cause their own detection. There’s another bit of copy-book morality for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection. What infernal humbug!’”
The Woman in White also takes on the issue of women’s rights, represented in the contrasts between Marian Halcombe and Madame Fosco.
Here’s the feisty Halcombe, during one exchange with her sister Laura:
“No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace — they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship — they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them gives us in return?”
Laura herself confesses this to Marian, after listening in on a conversation between her husband and his lawyer:
“I daresay it was very wrong and very discreditable to listen, but where is the woman, in the whole range of our sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract principles of honour, when those principles point one way, and when her affections, and the interests which grow out of them, point the other?”
Fosco represents the misogynistic worst of Victorian manners when he says of his wife:
“…we have but one opinion between us, and that opinion is mine. I will not have it cast in my teeth, at some future day, that Madame Fosco acted under my coercion, and was in plain fact, no witness at all.”
At the end of the novel, Count Fosco takes to the pedestal and orates:
“Where, in the history of the world, has a man of my order ever been found without a woman in the background self-immolated on the altar of his life? But I remember that I am writing in England. I remember that I was married in England, and I ask if a woman’s marriage obligations in this country provide for her private opinion of her husband’s principles? No! They charge her unreservedly to love, honour, and obey him. That is exactly what my wife has done. I stand here on a supreme moral elevation, and I loftily assert her accurate performance of her conjugal duties. Silence. Calumny! Your sympathy, Wives of England, for Madame Fosco!”
Marian, who has observed the silver-tongued charm of the Italian count, recognizes his spell over Madame Fosco:
“Women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue when he knows how to talk to them.”
Collins’ writing may not reach lofty heights often during his 512-page classic but his craftmanship is assured, his plot intriguing and themes eternal.
And there are some lines that deserve to live on, such as these words by Hartwright upon visiting the burial site of Anne Catherick, the woman in white, whose name is restored on her tombstone:
“So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead.”
“Sub-par” writing? Pshaw, humbug!
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for more than 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
© Claudio D'Andrea 2021
