The Woman in White

I recently went to Ghana, and took The Woman In White with me. It is not an obvious choice for so hot a clime; whereas I sweltered in the humidity of rainy season, Wilkie Collins describes the chill of the Cumberland moors. Similarly, while I engaged in trying to help the local community by building a school in the mornings, and spent pleasant afternoons trawling through bead markets and dancing to Ghanaian club music, Wilkie writes of a thrilling mystery and a conspiracy of terrifying proportions. Indeed, there seems to be no congruity between the book and the place, at all. Perhaps the stress should be laid on how long I was there for – a month. And The Woman in White is a bloody long book. I’m usually a fairly quick reader (the last Harry Potter in seven hours, anyone?); this took the best part of the month. But what a book!

It was written, as many great Victorian novels are, as a serialisation over the years 1859-60. Cue an inordinate amount of cliffhangers. A lecturer at university once urged us - his tired and hungover students - to read another great serialised novel – Dickens’ Bleak House – in the sections in which it was gradually published. That way, we could perhaps read it a little more closely to how it originally would have been read. Instead of closing the book when one is tired, surely ceasing to read when the author intended his reader to stop is allowing one more literary device to influence and add to our experience of the novel? I am beginning to sound like a pretentious fool (‘Beginning?’ I hear you say) and so I will return to the point I am laboriously trying to make. I read The Woman in White in stops and starts, section by section, so I feel I must have felt a little of the original drama – wondering what is to happen next, how the vast number of threads could ever possibly be tied together, however tenuously. What a delight! I recommend this way of reading at once.

The plot is riveting. Our hero, Walter Hartwright, a poor painting-master, lands the job of his dreams - teaching his suitably ladylike art to two delightful young women – the vivacious and charming Marian and her half-sister, the more demure but exquisitely beautiful Laura. Before he sets off, he encounters a terrified and wild-eyed young woman, dressed in white. He helps her on her way, but not before she mentions Limmeridge, the very house to which he is going to teach. This fact, and the following revelations add to the deeply mysterious plotline - he discovers that she has escaped from an asylum, and later on we discover her uncanny resemblance to Laura, who Walter inevitably falls in love with. A dramatic series of fairly Victorian events occur – an unhappy marriage, a brokenhearted self-exile to the Americas, a convoluted plot by villains for an heiress’ fortune, but Collins’ remarkable skill for characterisation makes it wholly different, to me, to anything like this that I have read before. Count Fosco is a morbidly obese, sinsterly lightfooted Italian, with a curious tenderness for small animals, and a frighteningly intelligent mind. Frederick Fairlie, guardian of the two women, is a selfish and feeble hypochondriac, determined, at all costs, to not be bothered by anyone. His lack of interest in anything that does not concern himself provides some of the funniest sections in the book, but proves equally frustrating.

My favourite character, however is, without a doubt, Marian. What I adore about her character is also what annoys me – her constant and self-conscious references to her role as a woman. She often remarks (with an element of sarcasm, I like to think) on the negative traits of women – stating offhandedly “women can’t draw – their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive.” Whilst I am by no means an artist, this pains me somewhat, and I can just imagine Victorian gentlemen reading this and having their suspicions of the inferiority of women confirmed. Wilkie is not so cruel as to portray women in a completely negative light – she displays courage, wit, and a sharp intelligence. It is the lightheartedness of her comments - “I am as inaccurate as women usually are” - that lends a charm to her words, and I simply cannot help but admire her. She seems to me to be the model of a constrained female desperate to break free – in her more heated speeches she declares such feisty statements as “If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down”! A woman before her time, perhaps, but one still thoroughly Victorian.

Anyway. As I am sure will be the case with most of the books I review here, I will now urge you to give this wonderful novel a try. It is rather long, but persevere – in a true Victorian style, the ending ties up magnificently, leaving one feeling smug and emotionally satisfied – and ready to tackle another morning’s building in the Ghanaian sun.