THE WOMAN IN WHITE THE WOMAN IN WHITE 'This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure and what a Man's resolution can achieve.' 1st edition by Sampson Low in three volumes, August 1860 1st US edition by Harpers in paper wrappers, August 1860 Published in 1860, one of the two novels (with The Moonstone ) for which Collins is most famous. It firmly established his reputation with the reading public and helped raise the circulation of All the Year Round. As Smith, Elder found to their cost, 'everyone was raving about it.' S. M. Ellis described how The Woman in White was so popular that 'every possible commodity was labelled "Woman in White". There were "Woman in White" cloaks and bonnets, "Woman in White" perfumes and all manner of toilet requisites, "Woman in White" Waltzes and Quadrilles.' It was parodied in Punch and even such a critical reviewer as Mrs Oliphant, was unusually favourable. Edward Fitzgerald read it several times and considered naming a sailing boat after the determined Marian Halcombe. Prince Albert read the book and approved.

Thackeray was engrossed from morning to sunset, and Gladstone found the story so absorbing that he missed a visit to the theatre. The Woman in White has never been out of print since its first publication. In the twentieth century there have been theatre, film, television and musical adaptations and even a comic-strip version. The Woman in White is generally regarded as the first Sensation Novel and inspired numerous imitations, most notably from Mary Braddon. The story is in part based on an eighteenth century case of abduction and wrongful imprisonment, taken from Mejan's Recueil des Causes Celebres. It uses the theme of substituted identity, a favourite with Collins, and also attacks the misuse of lunatic asylums. The story can be considered an early example of detective fiction with the hero, Walter Hartright, employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives. The use of multiple narratives draws on Collins's legal training and as he points out in his Preamble: 'the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness'.

Collins described his method of the writing The Woman in White in 'Mr Wilkie Collins in Gloucester Place', Number 81 in 'Celebrities at Home', The World, 26 December 1877; and in 'How I Write my Books', The Globe, 26 November 1887. John Gilbert frontispiece to the 1861 one volume Sampson Low edition Walter Hartright, a young drawing master, has secured a position in Cumberland on the recommendation of his old friend Professor Pesca, a political refugee from Italy. While walking home from Hampstead on his last evening in London, Hartright meets a mysterious woman dressed in white, apparently in deep distress. He helps her on her way but later learns that she has escaped from an asylum. The next day he travels north to Limmeridge House. The household comprises Mr Frederick Fairlie, a reclusive valetudinarian; Laura Fairlie, his niece; and Marian Halcombe, her devoted half-sister. Hartright finds that Laura bears an astonishing resemblance to the woman in white, called Anne Catherick.

The simple-minded Anne had lived for a time in Cumberland as a child and was devoted to Laura's mother, who first dressed her in white. Hartright and Laura fall in love. Laura, however, has promised her late father that she will marry Sir Percival Glyde, and Marian advises Walter to leave Limmeridge. Anne Catherick, after sending a letter to Laura warning her against Glyde, meets Hartright who is convinced that Glyde was responsible for shutting her in the asylum. Laura and Glyde marry in December 1849 and travel to Italy. Hartright also leaves England, joining an expedition to Honduras. After their honeymoon, Sir Percival and Lady Glyde return the following June to his family estate in Hampshire, Blackwater Park. They are accompanied by Glyde's friend, Count Fosco, who married Laura's aunt, Eleanor Fairlie. Marian Halcombe is also living at Blackwater and learns that Glyde is in financial difficulties. Sir Percival unsuccessfully attempts to bully Laura into signing a document which would allow him to use her marriage settlement of £20,000.

Marian now realises that Fosco is the true villain and is plotting something more sinister, especially as Anne has reappeared, promising to reveal to Laura a secret which will ruin Glyde. Marian eavesdrops on Fosco and Glyde but is caught in the rain. She collapses with a fever which turns to typhus. While she is ill Laura is tricked into travelling to London. Her identity and that of Anne Catherick are then switched. Anne Catherick dies of a heart condition and is buried in Cumberland as Laura, while Laura is drugged and placed in the asylum as Anne Catherick. When Marian recovers and visits the asylum hoping to learn something from Anne Catherick, she finds Laura, supposedly suffering from the delusion that she is Lady Glyde. Marian bribes the attendant and Laura escapes. Hartright has safely returned and the three live together in obscure poverty, determined to restore Laura's identity. Exposing the conspiracy depends on proving that Laura's journey to London took place after the date on the death certificate. While looking for evidence, Hartright discovers Glyde's secret. Several years earlier, Glyde had forged the marriage register at Old Welmingham Church to conceal his illegitimacy.

Glyde attempts to destroy the register entry, but the church vestry catches fire and he perishes in the flames. Hartright then discovers that Anne was the illegitimate child of Laura's father, which accounts for their resemblance. Hartright hopes that Pesca can identify Fosco but to his surprise finds that the Count is terrified when he recognises Pesca as a fellow member of a secret society. Hartright now has the power to force a written confession from Fosco and Laura's identity is restored. Hartright and Laura have married and, on the death of Frederick Fairlie, their son becomes the Heir of Limmeridge. A family tree for the main characters in The Woman in White can be found at the University of Iowa here . 7th English edition in 3 volumes Other 3 volume editions Between August and November 1860 there were altogether eight three volume editions. The 'second' to 'seventh' were designated as such on the title-page, followed by a 'new edition' on 1 November. These editions might more correctly be referred to as impressions but analysis of the text and errata shows that small differences exist between the various issues.

The complex story revolves around certain key dates and in the interests of accuracy Collins was obliged to make progressive alterations to the chronology of the plot. A review in The Times of 30 October 1860 by E. S. Dallas proved that the date of Laura's journey to London was impossible. Collins wrote to Edward Marston of Sampson Low on 31 October '...If any fresh impression of 'The Woman in White' is likely to be wanted, stop the press till I come back. The critic in The 'Times' is (between ourselves) right about the mistake in time. Shakespeare has made worse mistakes - that is one comfort, and readers are not critics who test an emotional book by the base rules of arithmetic, which is a second consolation. Nevertheless we will set it right the first opportunity...' The mistake, however, was not rectified until the first one volume edition in 1861. 1 volume editions Sampson Low 1861-1863, with a new preface and illustrated title by J.

Gilbert; Smith, Elder 1865-1872; Chatto & Windus 1875-1932 (with 8 illustrations by F. A. Fraser); Routledge 1904. First US edition 1 volume, Harpers, New York, 30 August 1860. Issued in paper wrappers and various coloured cloths (commonly black or brown), covers blocked in blind, spine lettered in gilt and illustrated with the silver figure of a woman. The advertisements form part of the collation and there are three states: 1. p (261) has 'Muloch' for 'Mulock' and lists nine titles; p (262) advertises The Mill on the Floss. 2. 'Mulock' is correctly spelled on p (261), eleven titles are listed and p (262) advertises The Mill on the Floss. 3. 'Mulock' is correctly spelled with eleven titles listed, but p (262) advertises nine titles by Thackeray. Further Harper's editions 1861-1902.

Translations Russian, St Petersburg 1860; French, (in Le Temps) Paris 1861, 2 vols, Paris 1862; Dutch, Amsterdam 1861, 1866; German, Stuttgart 1862, Vienna 1902. Critical editions Riverside, Boston 1969 (edited by A. Trodd and introduced by K. Tillotson); World's Classics 1980 (edited by H. P. Sucksmith); 1996 (edited by J. Sutherland); Penguin 1974 (edited by J. Symons); Everyman Library 1991 (introduced by N. Rance); Broadview Press 2006 (edited by Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox). PUBLICATION DATES The Woman in White was published in England in mid August 1860. The exact date, however, remains uncertain. Sampson Low consistently advertised publication on 15 August although Collins noted it as 16 August.

The title page of the manuscript contains a note in Collins's hand, signed and dated October 4th 1860: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - Reading Guide - PenguinRandomHouse.com Questions and Topics for Discussion INTRODUCTION “To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” —Henry James Illegitimacy, mistaken identity, insanity, inheritance, drugs, adultery, crimes of passion—all of these lurid features of Victorian life were Wilkie Collins’s stock in trade. In The Moonstone he single-handedly developed most elements of the classic detective story. With The Woman in White Collins created the archetypal sensation novel, spawning generations of imitators. But perhaps his greatest genius was his capacity to reveal the exotic amidst the commonplace, the “mysteries which are at our own doors.” Collins composed his masterworks during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of English literature. England’s cities and industries were booming, poverty and crime filled the news, melodrama ruled the theaters, and newfound wealth made class barriers increasingly permeable.

Dickens had just started his periodical All the Year Round, which helped to bring literature to a mass audience and blur the boundaries between highbrow and middlebrow culture. The new audience demanded a new type of novel, a novel as compelling as the scandalous headlines it competed with at the newsstands, able to keep readers in suspense from month to month and eager to buy the next issue. Dickens launched the magazine, and the golden decade of the serial novel, with A Tale of Two Cities in the spring of 1860, and Collins followed with The Woman in White in the fall. The plot of Collins’s novel had its origins in a French crime in which a Marquise was drugged and held prisoner under a false name so that her brother could inherit her estate. The midnight apparition of the title character—which Dickens called one of the two most dramatic scenes in literature—had its origin much closer to home. While walking a friend home one night Collins had heard a piercing scream from a nearby villa, then saw dashing from the house “the figure of a young and very beautiful young woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than to run . . .

in an attitude of supplication and terror.” Caroline Graves, recently widowed with an infant daughter, said she had been held captive at the house for several months “under threats and mesmeric influence.” The details of what followed are unknown, but before long she and Collins had made a home together and she had adopted a story about her origins more suited to Collins’s social position. Her father had been transformed from a carpenter to a “gentleman” and her former husband from an accountant’s clerk to a captain in the army. It has been argued that the two faces of Caroline—the newly respectable lady and the abused women of questionable background—are reflected in the look-alike characters in The Woman in White, Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick. Certainly the tension between appearance and reality that was central to the mystery had a powerful salience for Collins at the time, defying as he did the social expectations that he marry Caroline but also refusing to keep their relationship secret.

The Woman in White was an enormous success, prompting long lines at the publisher’s offices and even inspiring a popular song, the “Woman in White Waltz.” Collins earned a large advance for his next novel, securing his financial independence from his mother (who was the model for Hartright’s impulsive, childlike mother in the book, just as Hartright was modeled in part on Collins’s anxious, conventional brother). Readers were especially intrigued by the character of Marian Halcombe, whose charm, wit, independence, and ugliness probably have their roots in Collins’s friendship with George Eliot. Throughout his work Collins created strong female characters that defy Victorian mores and gender roles, assertive women with a calculating streak. Imitators took the notion to an extreme, creating anti-heroines that resorted to murder and bigamy to achieve their wicked ends. By the time Collins started writing The Moonstone in 1867, the outcry over “the fair-haired demon of modern fiction” had grown so shrill and the clichés of the sensation novel so tired that he decided to try something quite different. In so doing he invented the detective novel as we know it today.

For the mystery aficionado, the list of detective-story conventions that were first conceived by Collins for The Moonstone is truly remarkable. In Sergeant Cuff we meet the prototype for the eccentric, canny detective in conflict with the bumbling local police authorities. (Even Cuff’s passion for roses presages Sherlock Holmes’s beekeeping.) Multiple equally plausible suspects are introduced, each with motive and opportunity. Consciously withholding key pieces of information, Collins introduces the rules of “fair play,” which dictate that the detective should know no more than the reader. The summation of the crime before the gathered suspects, the revelation of the least likely suspect as the villain (albeit with a surprising twist), the confluence of multiple viewpoints to assemble the truth, a reconstruction of the crime, and the ultimate triumph of law and order were first formulated in The Moonstone in 1868. Synthesizing several legends of cursed Indian jewels, Collins also drew on the famous Road Murder case of 1860 for several details of the plot, including a paint-stained nightshirt and a tell-tale laundry book. The Shivering Sand portrayed in the book’s most chilling passages is based on a childhood journey to the Scottish coast.

Sadly, the opium-induced experiences of Ezra Jennings describe Collins’s own illness. As he was writing The Moonstone, the painful gout from which Collins had long suffered began to attack with increasing frequency and severity. No effective treatment was known at the time. He could find relief only in increasing doses of laudanum, an opium derivative. Collins soon required doses that would have killed anyone not habituated to the drug, first to get through the night, then increasingly in the daytime as well. Indeed he claimed that after he first outlined the book’s plot, opium wiped it almost entirely from his memory. Only his careful notes allowed him to proceed with the composition. As in The Woman in White, the solution to the mystery in The Moonstone is pieced together from the accounts of multiple narrators. This technique, which Collins first adopted after he witnessed the testimony in a trial, allows the author both to withhold key pieces of information from the reader and to adjust the pace as the plot demands. In the opening chapters, the discursiveness of chatty, avuncular Gabriel Betteredge sets the scene and introduces characters. Mathew Bruff’s lawyerly account moves the action along factually and quickly.

Rosanna Spearman’s letter creates a peak of emotional intensity. The overall effect is to call into question the reliability of any one narrator’s version of events. Truth is elusive, although if everyone told what he or she knew, the solution to the mystery could be found close to home. The excitement generated by The Moonstone boosted circulation of All The Year Round above the level set by Dickens’s Great Expectations. Critics praised the skillfully woven plot, the colorful characters, the high drama that kept readers in suspense to the last. But Collins was more than just “a master of plot and situation,” as T.S. Eliot once described him. His best work displays a depth of social and psychological insight that was extraordinary for his time or his genre. Collins’s novels are peopled with the outcasts of society—ex-prisoners, servants, addicts, the ugly, and the deformed—portrayed in all their humanity, often with greater color and sympathy than the heroes and heroines. Ever a rebel against social pretension, Collins once skipped a formal dinner party to which he had been invited in order to put on casual clothes and stand with the laborers watching the festivities from the street.

“In the course of a long experience of Society I never enjoyed a party half as much as I have enjoyed this,” he recalled. The same note of social defiance rings in The Moonstonewhen Rosanna, despite her class, her physical handicap, and her prison record dares to love and hope for love from the well-heeled hero of the story, Franklin Blake, in competition with the beautiful and wealthy Rachel Verinder. “Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress and took her ornaments off?” Rosanna challenges. Throughout Collins’s fiction, appearances and ornaments mask a darker reality. The respectable middle-class home hides unspeakable secrets. Wealth is rooted in plunder or deceit. Gossip parades as piety, embezzlement as charity. People are not who they appear to be. Reality is built on shivering, shifting sand. In many ways Collins is a master magician, using his craft to keep our rapt attention on the unfolding drama while revealing, with a sleight-of-hand, the mysteries that lie just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives. ABOUT WILKIE COLLINS Born in London in 1824, William Wilkie Collins grew up in the company of artists and writers.

Naming their son after his godfather, the popular artist Sir David Wilkie, the Collinses counted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth among their acquaintances. Collins’s father, a respected landscape artist, was hardworking and intensely religious, though probably not as severe as the ostentatiously pious Christians that Collins would later lampoon in his fiction. When he began attending private school at age 11, Wilkie was a good student but not a happy one. Small and clumsy, he was an easy victim for bullies. But he would later credit one of his boyhood tormentors with cultivating his narrative powers. The captain of his dormitory, a “great fellow of eighteen,” was fond of hearing stories at night. As Wilkie later recalled: “On the first night, my capacity for telling stories was tested at a preliminary examination—vanity urged me to do my best—and I paid the penalty. . . . I was the unhappy boy appointed to amuse the captain from that time forth. If I rebelled, the captain . . .

ordered me to be brought out in words I have never forgotten: ‘Bring Collins out to be thrashed.'” The brutality of his education was mercifully interrupted by a two-year family trip to Paris and Italy that was a great revelation for the boy. Liberated from the blinders of his parents’ earnest religiosity, Collins reveled in the spicy food, the street life, the horse races, the opera, and the gaudy splendor of Catholic churches. What he learned in Italy seemed more valuable to him than all of his schooling. His return after the trip to an English boarding school was so miserable that his family withdrew him at age 17. Apprenticed by his father as a clerk for a tea company, Collins showed little interest in commerce, preferring to spend office hours writing poems and plays. He was released from the apprenticeship and sent for legal training in London, but the law, too, was to serve primarily as grist for the literary mill rather than a means of earning a living. When his father died in 1847, Collins kept a promise he had made to write his biography, which received good reviews and was even a modest financial success.

Encouraged by the experience, he published a novel set in ancient Rome and a travel book before he met the man with whom he would achieve widespread literary success. Collins met Charles Dickens when performing in an amateur production of the play Not So Bad As We Seem in 1851. (Dickens, already one of England’s most popular authors, was both director and lead actor, while Wilkie played the part of his valet.) As a director Dickens was a notoriously tough taskmaster, but when rehearsal was over he had an equally inexhaustible taste for recreation. In Collins he found his equal for both work and play. Collins had inherited his father’s Herculean work ethic and attentiveness to the craft of his art, but like Dickens had rebelled against moral prudishness. Within a few years the two writers were companions on an acting company tour, a journey to Switzerland and Italy, and visits to the music halls and brothels of London’s Haymarket. Collins became one of the most hardworking and reliable contributors to Dickens’s Household Words and was soon appointed one of the its editors. It was for this magazine’s successor, All the Year Round, that Collins wrote the novels that made his reputation.

Their personal lives became even more intertwined when Wilkie’s brother Charles married Dickens’s youngest daughter Kate. Eventually the marriage would strain relations between the two men, for Dickens came to see Charles Collins as weak and the marriage as loveless. Wilkie Collins’s household arrangements were another source of contention, since Dickens disapproved of his relationship with Caroline Graves. It seems to have been a loving relationship, for Collins defended it openly against the harsh criticism of family and friends, doted on Caroline’s daughter, and looked after them his entire life, even after she left him to remarry. His passionate opposition to the institution of marriage made him an outcast in “good society,” but for a man who detested the social rituals of the elite as much as formalistic displays of organized religion, it was not an entirely unwelcome exile. The year 1868 marked both the height of Collins’s literary powers and the beginning of his decline. With the serial publication of The Moonstone, Collins’s monthly following reached, by some estimates, half of London’s population. But as he describes in the book’s preface, the painful gout and the opium required to relieve it were taking an increasing toll on his health.

Caroline left him in that same year, probably because he had begun seeing Martha Rudd, a dark, strong-minded, working-class girl who would become the mother of his three children but never his wife. His last collaboration with Dickens, a work entitled “No Thoroughfare” for the Christmas issue of All The Year Round, was published in 1868 as well, just two years before Dickens’s death. Although Collins lived twenty more years and published nineteen more books, their increasingly moralistic tone showed only glimmers of his former mastery. Collins died in 1890 and divided his estate equally between Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS The Woman in White Laura is presented as an ideal of Victorian womanhood, obedient, respectful of social conventions, and willing to sacrifice her own wishes for others. How does her double, Anne Catherick, illuminate the dark side of that ideal? “You will make aristocratic connections that will be of the greatest use to you in life,” Collins’s father told him when he started school. But Collins lived a life on the periphery of respectable English society that his father would not have condoned. In the novel, how is pedigree intertwined with deception and immorality?

Where do the lines blur between servants and the served? How are the underprivileged used as a screen for viewing the upper-crust characters? Why is Marian so mesmerized by Fosco, who she says “has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him”? Why is Fosco able to see Marian, despite her physical unattractiveness, as a “magnificent creature”? When Hartright returns from Honduras to restore Laura’s true identity, he brings tactics he had first used “against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America” to “the heart of civilised London.” Why is he forced to work outside the laws and conventions of society to achieve his aim? Why did he have to leave England and return in order to make this change? One critic has suggested that Marian and Fosco might be considered the true protagonists of The Woman in White. (In many ways they are much closer to Collins’s own bohemian sensibilities than Hartright and Laura.) In what sense might this be true? How would you interpret the story’s conclusion— especially Marian and Fosco’s fate—in this light? The use of multiple narrators was one of Collins’s favorite storytelling techniques.

What qualities does each narrator bring to the story? How does each change our view of the characters? Could the story have been told from a single viewpoint, and if so, whose? The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins - Reading Guide - PenguinRandomHouse.com Questions and Topics for Discussion INTRODUCTION “To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” —Henry James Illegitimacy, mistaken identity, insanity, inheritance, drugs, adultery, crimes of passion—all of these lurid features of Victorian life were Wilkie Collins’s stock in trade. In The Moonstone he single-handedly developed most elements of the classic detective story. With The Woman in White Collins created the archetypal sensation novel, spawning generations of imitators. But perhaps his greatest genius was his capacity to reveal the exotic amidst the commonplace, the “mysteries which are at our own doors.” Collins composed his masterworks during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of English literature. England’s cities and industries were booming, poverty and crime filled the news, melodrama ruled the theaters, and newfound wealth made class barriers increasingly permeable.

Dickens had just started his periodical All the Year Round, which helped to bring literature to a mass audience and blur the boundaries between highbrow and middlebrow culture. The new audience demanded a new type of novel, a novel as compelling as the scandalous headlines it competed with at the newsstands, able to keep readers in suspense from month to month and eager to buy the next issue. Dickens launched the magazine, and the golden decade of the serial novel, with A Tale of Two Cities in the spring of 1860, and Collins followed with The Woman in White in the fall. The plot of Collins’s novel had its origins in a French crime in which a Marquise was drugged and held prisoner under a false name so that her brother could inherit her estate. The midnight apparition of the title character—which Dickens called one of the two most dramatic scenes in literature—had its origin much closer to home. While walking a friend home one night Collins had heard a piercing scream from a nearby villa, then saw dashing from the house “the figure of a young and very beautiful young woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than to run . . .

in an attitude of supplication and terror.” Caroline Graves, recently widowed with an infant daughter, said she had been held captive at the house for several months “under threats and mesmeric influence.” The details of what followed are unknown, but before long she and Collins had made a home together and she had adopted a story about her origins more suited to Collins’s social position. Her father had been transformed from a carpenter to a “gentleman” and her former husband from an accountant’s clerk to a captain in the army. It has been argued that the two faces of Caroline—the newly respectable lady and the abused women of questionable background—are reflected in the look-alike characters in The Woman in White, Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick. Certainly the tension between appearance and reality that was central to the mystery had a powerful salience for Collins at the time, defying as he did the social expectations that he marry Caroline but also refusing to keep their relationship secret.

The Woman in White was an enormous success, prompting long lines at the publisher’s offices and even inspiring a popular song, the “Woman in White Waltz.” Collins earned a large advance for his next novel, securing his financial independence from his mother (who was the model for Hartright’s impulsive, childlike mother in the book, just as Hartright was modeled in part on Collins’s anxious, conventional brother). Readers were especially intrigued by the character of Marian Halcombe, whose charm, wit, independence, and ugliness probably have their roots in Collins’s friendship with George Eliot. Throughout his work Collins created strong female characters that defy Victorian mores and gender roles, assertive women with a calculating streak. Imitators took the notion to an extreme, creating anti-heroines that resorted to murder and bigamy to achieve their wicked ends. By the time Collins started writing The Moonstone in 1867, the outcry over “the fair-haired demon of modern fiction” had grown so shrill and the clichés of the sensation novel so tired that he decided to try something quite different. In so doing he invented the detective novel as we know it today.

For the mystery aficionado, the list of detective-story conventions that were first conceived by Collins for The Moonstone is truly remarkable. In Sergeant Cuff we meet the prototype for the eccentric, canny detective in conflict with the bumbling local police authorities. (Even Cuff’s passion for roses presages Sherlock Holmes’s beekeeping.) Multiple equally plausible suspects are introduced, each with motive and opportunity. Consciously withholding key pieces of information, Collins introduces the rules of “fair play,” which dictate that the detective should know no more than the reader. The summation of the crime before the gathered suspects, the revelation of the least likely suspect as the villain (albeit with a surprising twist), the confluence of multiple viewpoints to assemble the truth, a reconstruction of the crime, and the ultimate triumph of law and order were first formulated in The Moonstone in 1868. Synthesizing several legends of cursed Indian jewels, Collins also drew on the famous Road Murder case of 1860 for several details of the plot, including a paint-stained nightshirt and a tell-tale laundry book. The Shivering Sand portrayed in the book’s most chilling passages is based on a childhood journey to the Scottish coast.

Sadly, the opium-induced experiences of Ezra Jennings describe Collins’s own illness. As he was writing The Moonstone, the painful gout from which Collins had long suffered began to attack with increasing frequency and severity. No effective treatment was known at the time. He could find relief only in increasing doses of laudanum, an opium derivative. Collins soon required doses that would have killed anyone not habituated to the drug, first to get through the night, then increasingly in the daytime as well. Indeed he claimed that after he first outlined the book’s plot, opium wiped it almost entirely from his memory. Only his careful notes allowed him to proceed with the composition. As in The Woman in White, the solution to the mystery in The Moonstone is pieced together from the accounts of multiple narrators. This technique, which Collins first adopted after he witnessed the testimony in a trial, allows the author both to withhold key pieces of information from the reader and to adjust the pace as the plot demands. In the opening chapters, the discursiveness of chatty, avuncular Gabriel Betteredge sets the scene and introduces characters. Mathew Bruff’s lawyerly account moves the action along factually and quickly.

Rosanna Spearman’s letter creates a peak of emotional intensity. The overall effect is to call into question the reliability of any one narrator’s version of events. Truth is elusive, although if everyone told what he or she knew, the solution to the mystery could be found close to home. The excitement generated by The Moonstone boosted circulation of All The Year Round above the level set by Dickens’s Great Expectations. Critics praised the skillfully woven plot, the colorful characters, the high drama that kept readers in suspense to the last. But Collins was more than just “a master of plot and situation,” as T.S. Eliot once described him. His best work displays a depth of social and psychological insight that was extraordinary for his time or his genre. Collins’s novels are peopled with the outcasts of society—ex-prisoners, servants, addicts, the ugly, and the deformed—portrayed in all their humanity, often with greater color and sympathy than the heroes and heroines. Ever a rebel against social pretension, Collins once skipped a formal dinner party to which he had been invited in order to put on casual clothes and stand with the laborers watching the festivities from the street.

“In the course of a long experience of Society I never enjoyed a party half as much as I have enjoyed this,” he recalled. The same note of social defiance rings in The Moonstonewhen Rosanna, despite her class, her physical handicap, and her prison record dares to love and hope for love from the well-heeled hero of the story, Franklin Blake, in competition with the beautiful and wealthy Rachel Verinder. “Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress and took her ornaments off?” Rosanna challenges. Throughout Collins’s fiction, appearances and ornaments mask a darker reality. The respectable middle-class home hides unspeakable secrets. Wealth is rooted in plunder or deceit. Gossip parades as piety, embezzlement as charity. People are not who they appear to be. Reality is built on shivering, shifting sand. In many ways Collins is a master magician, using his craft to keep our rapt attention on the unfolding drama while revealing, with a sleight-of-hand, the mysteries that lie just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives. ABOUT WILKIE COLLINS Born in London in 1824, William Wilkie Collins grew up in the company of artists and writers.

Naming their son after his godfather, the popular artist Sir David Wilkie, the Collinses counted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth among their acquaintances. Collins’s father, a respected landscape artist, was hardworking and intensely religious, though probably not as severe as the ostentatiously pious Christians that Collins would later lampoon in his fiction. When he began attending private school at age 11, Wilkie was a good student but not a happy one. Small and clumsy, he was an easy victim for bullies. But he would later credit one of his boyhood tormentors with cultivating his narrative powers. The captain of his dormitory, a “great fellow of eighteen,” was fond of hearing stories at night. As Wilkie later recalled: “On the first night, my capacity for telling stories was tested at a preliminary examination—vanity urged me to do my best—and I paid the penalty. . . . I was the unhappy boy appointed to amuse the captain from that time forth. If I rebelled, the captain . . .

ordered me to be brought out in words I have never forgotten: ‘Bring Collins out to be thrashed.'” The brutality of his education was mercifully interrupted by a two-year family trip to Paris and Italy that was a great revelation for the boy. Liberated from the blinders of his parents’ earnest religiosity, Collins reveled in the spicy food, the street life, the horse races, the opera, and the gaudy splendor of Catholic churches. What he learned in Italy seemed more valuable to him than all of his schooling. His return after the trip to an English boarding school was so miserable that his family withdrew him at age 17. Apprenticed by his father as a clerk for a tea company, Collins showed little interest in commerce, preferring to spend office hours writing poems and plays. He was released from the apprenticeship and sent for legal training in London, but the law, too, was to serve primarily as grist for the literary mill rather than a means of earning a living. When his father died in 1847, Collins kept a promise he had made to write his biography, which received good reviews and was even a modest financial success.

Encouraged by the experience, he published a novel set in ancient Rome and a travel book before he met the man with whom he would achieve widespread literary success. Collins met Charles Dickens when performing in an amateur production of the play Not So Bad As We Seem in 1851. (Dickens, already one of England’s most popular authors, was both director and lead actor, while Wilkie played the part of his valet.) As a director Dickens was a notoriously tough taskmaster, but when rehearsal was over he had an equally inexhaustible taste for recreation. In Collins he found his equal for both work and play. Collins had inherited his father’s Herculean work ethic and attentiveness to the craft of his art, but like Dickens had rebelled against moral prudishness. Within a few years the two writers were companions on an acting company tour, a journey to Switzerland and Italy, and visits to the music halls and brothels of London’s Haymarket. Collins became one of the most hardworking and reliable contributors to Dickens’s Household Words and was soon appointed one of the its editors. It was for this magazine’s successor, All the Year Round, that Collins wrote the novels that made his reputation.

Their personal lives became even more intertwined when Wilkie’s brother Charles married Dickens’s youngest daughter Kate. Eventually the marriage would strain relations between the two men, for Dickens came to see Charles Collins as weak and the marriage as loveless. Wilkie Collins’s household arrangements were another source of contention, since Dickens disapproved of his relationship with Caroline Graves. It seems to have been a loving relationship, for Collins defended it openly against the harsh criticism of family and friends, doted on Caroline’s daughter, and looked after them his entire life, even after she left him to remarry. His passionate opposition to the institution of marriage made him an outcast in “good society,” but for a man who detested the social rituals of the elite as much as formalistic displays of organized religion, it was not an entirely unwelcome exile. The year 1868 marked both the height of Collins’s literary powers and the beginning of his decline. With the serial publication of The Moonstone, Collins’s monthly following reached, by some estimates, half of London’s population. But as he describes in the book’s preface, the painful gout and the opium required to relieve it were taking an increasing toll on his health.

Caroline left him in that same year, probably because he had begun seeing Martha Rudd, a dark, strong-minded, working-class girl who would become the mother of his three children but never his wife. His last collaboration with Dickens, a work entitled “No Thoroughfare” for the Christmas issue of All The Year Round, was published in 1868 as well, just two years before Dickens’s death. Although Collins lived twenty more years and published nineteen more books, their increasingly moralistic tone showed only glimmers of his former mastery. Collins died in 1890 and divided his estate equally between Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Sitting near the Shivering Sand with Betteredge early in the story, Rosanna says, “It looks to me as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it—all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!” What does she mean? Who are the people who can’t escape, and why can’t they? Near the end of the first period of the novel, Sergeant Cuff makes three predictions. How do they affect your expectations of what will happen later? How do you account for Miss Rachel’s continued silence at this point?

When The Moonstone was first published, the narrative of Drusilla Clack was one of its most popular sections. The titles of the tracts she so profusely distributes (“Satan under the Tea Table,” etc.) are in fact only slightly parodied from those that Collins encountered in his father’s religious circle. How does Collins allow the reader to see the vanity, greed, and pettiness beneath the model of piety and propriety she portrays in her story? Collins had a lifelong interest in the inner workings of the mind, especially when it was under of the influence of “mesmerism” or opium. What does Collins’s treatment of dreams, drugs, and delirium suggest about the value of the subconscious and the subjective mind, especially as opposed to the more objective methods of Sergeant Cuff? After a conventional happy ending in England, Collins shifts the setting to conclude with an epilogue in India. How does the portrayal of the Brahmins here compare with that of Betteredge and Miss Clack? How does the meaning of story change because of the Indian frame at its opening and closing? Dickens was primarily a master of character, Collins of plot, argued T.S. Eliot.

Yet each learned much from the other during their years of intense collaboration. (Dickens’s final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, draws heavily on The Moonstone.) What do you think of Eliot’s assertion that “Dickens’s characters are real because there is no one like them; Collins’s because they are so painstakingly coherent and life-like”? Anne Catherick's "place" : a deconstructive analysis of the relation of identity and power in the text of Wilkie Collins' The woman in white (Book, 1986) [WorldCat.org] The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. E-mail Message: I thought you might be interested in this item at Title: Anne Catherick's "place" : a deconstructive analysis of the relation of identity and power in the text of Wilkie Collins' The woman in white Author: D W Norton Publisher: 1986. OCLC:15245126 The ReCaptcha terms you entered were incorrect. Please try to match the 2 words shown in the window, or try the audio version.

Book Details : The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - eBook The Woman in White About the Book HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 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.’ One of the earliest works of detective’ fiction with a narrative woven together from multiple characters, Wilkie Collins partly based his infamous novel on a real-life eighteenth century case of abduction and wrongful imprisonment. In 1859, the story caused a sensation with its readers, hooking their attention with the ghostly first scene where the mysterious Woman in White’ Anne Catherick comes across Walter Hartright. Chilling, suspenseful and tense in mood, the novel remains as emotive for its readers today as when it was first published. Combined Author An introduction to The Woman in White - The British Library An introduction to The Woman in White The Woman in White was the first great sensation novel. Roger Luckhurst considers how Wilkie Collins's intricately plotted novel borrows elements from realist and Gothic fiction, and combines suspense and stimulation.

‘Sensation fiction’ Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Woman in White, was first serialised in Charles Dickens’s journal All The Year Round, starting in November 1859. It was a huge success, and the publication of the novel in 1860 made Collins an independently wealthy man, able to command up to £5000 advances for his novels. The Woman in White was the key book in establishing what became known as ‘sensation fiction’: breathless and deviously plotted novels that combined domestic Realism, the simple moral universe of theatre melodrama (virtuous women menaced by dastardly cads), and the thirst for gruesome and spectacular crimes that an ever-increasing newspaper readership lapped up with a mix of moral outrage and prurience. Sensation fiction thus fused the Gothic romance with the Realist novel, finding horrors not in some fantastical Medieval castle, but behind the doors of apparently normal suburban semi-detached houses, where secrets festered and multiplied.

Collins produced a stream of such fictions at his height of creativity in the 1860s, including most famously The Moonstone (1868), but the term ‘sensation fiction’ was embedded in the culture by allied works like the 1860 play by Dion Boucicault called The Colleen Bawn (Celtic for the ‘white girl’), a phenomenal West End success, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Its roots in the ‘penny dreadfuls’ and ‘Newgate novels’, popular fictions that gleefully detailed notorious crimes and criminals, meant that sensation fiction was at best considered middlebrow entertainment, at worst a low exploitation genre that endangered public morals. The ‘sensation’ in question was not just the lurid crimes of bigamy, illegitimacy, murder and poisoning, all those cheap thrills of melodramatic plot. Sensation was also meant to signal fiction that played on the physiology of the reader’s nerves, and risked over-stimulation of the fragile and uneducated bodies that consumed it. This was an updated complaint long held against Gothic novels.

Some concerned commentators worried at a ‘contagion’ of sensation fictions in the 1860s, an era in which the new sciences of psychology and neurology suspected that rapidly expanding urban environments were causing nervous exhaustion and collapse. The world was becoming debilitated by the shocks and collisions of modernity. With these lowly associations, Collins’s work never reached the acceptance afforded to his close friend and collaborator Charles Dickens. Collins was always praised for the technical ingenuity of his plots, but in a famous and telling comment, the influential Saturday Review dismissed his ‘mechanical talent’ as similar to that of a gifted cabinet-maker: hugely skilful in craft, but never enough to rank as proper art. [1] This class distinction is self-evident: Collins was a mere artisan. The novel The Woman in White is an intricately plotted story, organised as a chain of ‘witness’ statements from a wide diversity of characters designed to unravel a cunning conspiracy against innocent women by a duo of memorable aristocratic monsters, Sir Percival Glyde and his devilish companion, the Italian Count Fosco.

It is, ultimately, about a degenerate aristocrat after a middle-class woman’s money that passes to him through their marriage if the woman is declared dead. He is a man prepared to plot actual murder to retain his hold on the cash and also to keep his own desperate secret secure. The intricacies of the plot, however, defy easy summary, each convolution and partial revelation driving the reader on to the next scene, and the next, disclosing the secret like a series of Russian dolls. It was said that the eminent politician William Gladstone once cancelled an evening appointment to finish a Collins novel. This is a common reader experience . Everything develops from one of the most famous scenes in Victorian literature: the late-night encounter of Walter Hartright with a mysterious lone woman, near Hampstead Heath, after midnight, ‘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’ (ch. 4). He is entirely unable to locate her in class terms – she is neither a lady nor of the humble ranks – and although unchaperoned ‘at that suspiciously late hour’ she is also clearly not a prostitute.

This is the enigmatic Anne Catherick, escaped from an asylum, who initially only serves to further the plot by acting as an uncanny double for Hartright’s beloved, Laura Fairlie, the main damsel in distress. Fairlie will be the target of Glyde and Fosco’s cunning plot. That Anne Catherick’s story is only unravelled in the margins of the central narrative somehow further guarantees her enigmatic hold on the imagination. She acts as a powerful cipher. Gothic romance in modern dress Collins used all the apparatus of the Gothic romance in modern dress. The castle becomes the oppressive country house Blackwater with its decaying wings and oppressive lake. The dungeon is transformed into a lunatic asylum or domestic servitude in marriage. The monstrous Machiavellian lord becomes the evil genius, Count Fosco. The old feudal law of droit de seigneur is transformed into cynical men manipulating modern laws about Married Women’s Property rights. Significantly, the dark forest outside the laws of civilisation becomes London, the bewildering, labyrinthine metropolis. Collins also explores one of the key themes of Gothic fiction – that the world goes awry when paternal authority is weak, perverted or absent.

Fathers and husbands – other than the aptly named Hartright – are conniving, irresponsible or dastardly in The Woman in White. The beloved, Laura Fairlie, is a rather insipid ideal, yet she and Hartright set up an intriguing and unconventional ménage with her sister Marion, a figure heavily coded as lesbian. Collins continues the Gothic’s sly subversion of the patriarch’s authority. Some contexts Collins took the central plot device of a woman falsely imprisoned in an asylum under an assumed name from an actual French case from 1776 which he read about in Maurice Méjan’s book Recueil des Causes Célèbres (c.1808). But sensation fiction felt so modern because it picked up on very contemporary events and debates too. Collins was known to keep a cuttings book of newspaper reports that might inspire plots. So, for instance, Collins exploits debates about the rights of married women, fresh in the mind from the passage of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed civil divorce in England for the first time.

It was only in 1882 that women were finally allowed to have property under the law, rather than being passed as chattel between father and husband. Collins also exploited fears about the Lunacy Laws, which were open to exploitation by unscrupulous husbands and 'the mad doctors'. All of these elements had come together in the spectacular case of Lord and Lady Bulwer-Lytton in 1858, when Rosina Lytton had denounced her husband for his cruelties only to be confined in an asylum for several weeks before a public outcry ensured her release. Collins attacked middle-class hypocrisy perhaps because he was himself so bohemian. He kept a respectable family home with his mother for many years, while setting up his mistress Catherine Groves in a house nearby. Groves was his long-term companion – one long-standing myth is that his first encounter with Catherine exactly repeated Hartright’s encounter with the woman in white. Collins eventually set up home with Groves, but only to have another mistress, the working-class Martha Rudd (with whom he had three children), in a house a few streets away. He happily referred to this as his morganatic marriage. Collins was an epicurean of wine and women.

It was another reason why he was never quite accepted by Victorian society, but this double or even triple life also gave him a direct route into the heart of English Victorianism: sex, shame and secrets. Footnotes The Woman in White: Wilkie Collins: Books - Amazon.ca The Woman in White click to open popover Special Offers and Product Promotions No Kindle device required. Download one of the Free Kindle apps to start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, and computer. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product Details Publisher: Chatto & Windus; Fine-paper edition edition (1902) Language: English By Paul McGrath on Jan. 29 2003 Format: Mass Market Paperback This one is referred to as a classic, as it should be, but it's really not the kind of book one first thinks of when hearing that word.

For one thing, it's in part a mystery, and these generally have a tough time gaining and maintaining critical acceptance; for another, it was initially described as a "sensationalist" novel, and although that term meant something entirely different 130 years ago, the description still applies and probably has something to do with this book not having achieved the status that it deserves. Whatever, this is a truly terrific read, in every respect, with a great plot, superb characters, and a magnificent writing style. The plot, briefly, has to do with a youthful and somewhat naÃ¯ve heiress, who, through the manipulations and connivances of alleged friends, is basely used and driven to the brink of despair. Although her situation seems hopeless, she nevertheless has two supporters: her cousin, the superbly portrayed Marian Halcombe; and her former drawing-master--and the primary narrator of the tale--Walter Hartright. Gliding in and out of their lives is the title character, the mysterious and tragic Woman in White.

It would not be prudent for me to give away anything else, except to say that about a hundred pages into this novel the plot gallops along at a break-neck pace, with several mysteries, secrets and plot-twists to be unraveled, all of which are completely credible. The characters are superbly and memorably drawn, particularly the indomitable Count Fosco. He is a large, loud, magnificently-dressed, sweet-talking and irresistible force, constantly playing with his little mice and birds, and disguising in every way the plots and schemes which roil through his brain. Read more › 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By D.

Spidet on March 11 2004 Format: Mass Market Paperback Everyone has their own criteria for what makes a great novel-for me the best praise is that(in the words of an earlier reviewer) I was desperate for lunchtime at work and hometime so that I could continue reading.I forwent sleep untill I'd finished the book.It took me three days when a similar-length novel can take me months.When you sacrifice things to read a book you KNOW you have a pearl.When you "don't have the time" you have an also-ran. This book,for me,had everything:Fantastic prose(Austen-like),deep characters,convoluted plot,humour, supense.I shy from naming a favourite character out of fear of disloyalty to the others! I'd previously read Brave New World and it was just so awful with it's two dimensional characters and plot (albeit an outstanding idea)and I think this helped my appreciation of The Woman in White.I'd never even heard of it until recently.I,of course, would recommend you read this and,short of weddings,funerals,etc.be prepared to sacrifice your engagements! 3 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By IRA Ross on Sept. 21 2002 Format: Mass Market Paperback Count Fosco--Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, etc.--is as charming and likable a villain as one is likely to meet in literature. This is a brilliant and talented man of the world, a gentle animal lover who raises birds and treats his pet white mice as if they were his children. Count Fosco is also a scheming, cunning and avaricious man, who together with his friend, Sir Percival Glyde, conspire to ruin the lovely Laura Fairlie, who eventually becomes Lady Glyde. _The Woman In White_ is a wonderfully written gothic mystery novel, a romance that is deeply atmospheric with richly developed characters. Each section of the novel is narrated by the participants in this complex yet incredibly involving book, the principals being Walter Hartright, a drawing instructor whose heart is always in the right place, and Marian Holcombe, Lady Glyde's loyal and loving half-sister.

And, of course, there is the elusive, ill-fated Anne Catherick, "the woman in white," shrouded in mystery, and the link between Laura Failie (and her identity) and the malevolent machinations of Count Fosco and of Percival Glyde, who is desperate to protect his "Secret" at all costs. Despite some unresolved loose ends, I was never less than completely immersed in this extraordinary story of treachery, betrayal, but more importantly sisterly fealty and devotion. 3 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Robert Moore on Feb. 24 2002 Format: Mass Market Paperback THE WOMAN IN WHITE is one of those books that wants to make a deal with you.

If you can, as Coleridge put it, temporarily suspend your disbelief about the difficulty of such elements as two women who are virtually identical to one another in appearance, on the astonishing proliferation of sheer coincidence, and the improbability that someone could not prove to others that they are who they say that they are, this book will provide you with some of the most exciting moments in all of literature. Yeah, much of it is absurdly farfetched. But I know of very, very few novels that have left me as breathless as this one. There were several moments that left me entirely unable to put it down. The novel also contains one of the greatest villains in the history of literature. In fact, I cannot think of a more delightful villain in English literature than the outrageous Count Fosco. There are very, very many reasons to read this novel, but even if all the others were not to exist, this novel would bear reading just to become acquainted with Count Fosco. Brilliant, obese, larger-than-life, sentimental, eloquent, arrogant, conceited, eloquent, and heartless, Count Fosco is grand in the way that a James Bond villain is grand.

Interestingly, as I read the novel for the first time, Fosco kept putting me in mind of another great fat villain in literature and movies: Kasper Gutman of THE MALTESE FALCON. Imagine my delight when I learned that there was a 1948 film version of THE WOMAN IN WHITE, and that Sydney Greenstreet, the same person who portrayed Kasper Gutman in THE MALTESE FALCON, played the role of Count Fosco. I'm not sure he possesses the physical grace attributed to Fosco, but he definitely has the eloquence and charisma. If you haven't read this book, please do yourself a favor and do so. Only . . . make sure you have plenty of time and that you don't have to be interrupted. There are times when you won't want to stop. One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again.

Collins Classics - The Woman in White : Wilkie Collins : 9780007480784 Collins Classics - The Woman in White Electronic book text We can notify you when this item is back in stock Notify me Try AbeBooks Description HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. '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.' One of the earliest works of 'detective' fiction with a narrative woven together from multiple characters, Wilkie Collins partly based his infamous novel on a real-life eighteenth century case of abduction and wrongful imprisonment. In 1859, the story caused a sensation with its readers, hooking their attention with the ghostly first scene where the mysterious 'Woman in White' Anne Catherick comes across Walter Hartright. Chilling, suspenseful and tense in mood, the novel remains as emotive for its readers today as when it was first published.

show more Product details Woman In White: Wilkie Collins: 9780140620245: Literature: Amazon Canada By Paul McGrath on Jan. 29 2003 Format: Mass Market Paperback This one is referred to as a classic, as it should be, but it's really not the kind of book one first thinks of when hearing that word. For one thing, it's in part a mystery, and these generally have a tough time gaining and maintaining critical acceptance; for another, it was initially described as a "sensationalist" novel, and although that term meant something entirely different 130 years ago, the description still applies and probably has something to do with this book not having achieved the status that it deserves. Whatever, this is a truly terrific read, in every respect, with a great plot, superb characters, and a magnificent writing style. The plot, briefly, has to do with a youthful and somewhat naÃ¯ve heiress, who, through the manipulations and connivances of alleged friends, is basely used and driven to the brink of despair.

Although her situation seems hopeless, she nevertheless has two supporters: her cousin, the superbly portrayed Marian Halcombe; and her former drawing-master--and the primary narrator of the tale--Walter Hartright. Gliding in and out of their lives is the title character, the mysterious and tragic Woman in White. It would not be prudent for me to give away anything else, except to say that about a hundred pages into this novel the plot gallops along at a break-neck pace, with several mysteries, secrets and plot-twists to be unraveled, all of which are completely credible. The characters are superbly and memorably drawn, particularly the indomitable Count Fosco. He is a large, loud, magnificently-dressed, sweet-talking and irresistible force, constantly playing with his little mice and birds, and disguising in every way the plots and schemes which roil through his brain. Read more › 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By IRA Ross on Sept.

21 2002 Format: Mass Market Paperback Count Fosco--Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, etc.--is as charming and likable a villain as one is likely to meet in literature. This is a brilliant and talented man of the world, a gentle animal lover who raises birds and treats his pet white mice as if they were his children. Count Fosco is also a scheming, cunning and avaricious man, who together with his friend, Sir Percival Glyde, conspire to ruin the lovely Laura Fairlie, who eventually becomes Lady Glyde. _The Woman In White_ is a wonderfully written gothic mystery novel, a romance that is deeply atmospheric with richly developed characters. Each section of the novel is narrated by the participants in this complex yet incredibly involving book, the principals being Walter Hartright, a drawing instructor whose heart is always in the right place, and Marian Holcombe, Lady Glyde's loyal and loving half-sister.

And, of course, there is the elusive, ill-fated Anne Catherick, "the woman in white," shrouded in mystery, and the link between Laura Failie (and her identity) and the malevolent machinations of Count Fosco and of Percival Glyde, who is desperate to protect his "Secret" at all costs. Despite some unresolved loose ends, I was never less than completely immersed in this extraordinary story of treachery, betrayal, but more importantly sisterly fealty and devotion. 3 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By D.

Spidet on March 11 2004 Format: Mass Market Paperback Everyone has their own criteria for what makes a great novel-for me the best praise is that(in the words of an earlier reviewer) I was desperate for lunchtime at work and hometime so that I could continue reading.I forwent sleep untill I'd finished the book.It took me three days when a similar-length novel can take me months.When you sacrifice things to read a book you KNOW you have a pearl.When you "don't have the time" you have an also-ran. This book,for me,had everything:Fantastic prose(Austen-like),deep characters,convoluted plot,humour, supense.I shy from naming a favourite character out of fear of disloyalty to the others! I'd previously read Brave New World and it was just so awful with it's two dimensional characters and plot (albeit an outstanding idea)and I think this helped my appreciation of The Woman in White.I'd never even heard of it until recently.I,of course, would recommend you read this and,short of weddings,funerals,etc.be prepared to sacrifice your engagements! 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Robert Moore on Feb. 24 2002 Format: Mass Market Paperback THE WOMAN IN WHITE is one of those books that wants to make a deal with you. If you can, as Coleridge put it, temporarily suspend your disbelief about the difficulty of such elements as two women who are virtually identical to one another in appearance, on the astonishing proliferation of sheer coincidence, and the improbability that someone could not prove to others that they are who they say that they are, this book will provide you with some of the most exciting moments in all of literature. Yeah, much of it is absurdly farfetched. But I know of very, very few novels that have left me as breathless as this one. There were several moments that left me entirely unable to put it down. The novel also contains one of the greatest villains in the history of literature. In fact, I cannot think of a more delightful villain in English literature than the outrageous Count Fosco.

There are very, very many reasons to read this novel, but even if all the others were not to exist, this novel would bear reading just to become acquainted with Count Fosco. Brilliant, obese, larger-than-life, sentimental, eloquent, arrogant, conceited, eloquent, and heartless, Count Fosco is grand in the way that a James Bond villain is grand. Interestingly, as I read the novel for the first time, Fosco kept putting me in mind of another great fat villain in literature and movies: Kasper Gutman of THE MALTESE FALCON. Imagine my delight when I learned that there was a 1948 film version of THE WOMAN IN WHITE, and that Sydney Greenstreet, the same person who portrayed Kasper Gutman in THE MALTESE FALCON, played the role of Count Fosco. I'm not sure he possesses the physical grace attributed to Fosco, but he definitely has the eloquence and charisma. If you haven't read this book, please do yourself a favor and do so. Only . . . make sure you have plenty of time and that you don't have to be interrupted. There are times when you won't want to stop.

One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again.

Question: How is Anne Catherick referred to in the title of a book by Wilkie Collins?
Answer: The Woman in White