The Woman in White — Commentary

In brief

Walter Hartright, a young drawing master, is walking to London at night when a hand touches his shoulder and he turns to find “the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments” in the middle of the road (Hartright, ch. IV). She is Anne Catherick, escaped from an asylum. In Cumberland he teaches two half-sisters, the heiress Laura Fairlie, who looks uncannily like the woman on the road, and Marian Halcombe, who has all the brains in the house. Walter and Laura fall in love, but Laura is promised to Sir Percival Glyde, and she keeps her word.

At Blackwater Park, Glyde needs his wife’s money, and his friend Count Fosco, enormous, musical and delighted with himself, finds the way to get it. Anne, who is dying, is buried under Laura’s name. Laura, drugged, is put in the asylum under Anne’s. Marian gets her out, and Walter comes home from Central America to find his love standing beside her own grave. The rest of the book is the slow, ingenious work of proving that a woman is alive.

The argument

Collins’s great discovery is that a modern person exists on paper. Laura has done nothing wrong and is not hidden in any castle. She is erased by a doctor’s certificate, an undertaker’s woman, a mason and a family lawyer, all acting in good faith. When she is brought back to Limmeridge, even the servants fail to know her, and when Walter takes the facts to a solicitor, the answer comes without unkindness: “you have not the shadow of a case” (Hartright, Third Epoch, ch. IV). The horror lies in how well the machinery works. Gothic novels kept their captive women in Italian ruins; Collins keeps his within a train ride of London.

The preamble says as much. The law, it announces, “is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse”. The story’s engine is a clause in a marriage settlement. The family solicitor, Mr Gilmore, tries to keep Laura’s twenty thousand pounds in her own power, and Glyde’s lawyers strike the clause out, so that the whole sum goes to the husband if she dies childless. Mr Fairlie, her guardian, cannot be troubled to resist (Gilmore, ch. III). Everything that follows is that clause carried out by other means. Marian’s outburst to Laura, set down in her diary, is the plainest statement of the case: “No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace” (Marian, First Epoch, ch. II).

Yet the novel’s first sentence is a lie the rest of it exposes: “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” The patient woman has little to do but suffer, and the resolution that matters first is also a woman’s. Marian sells all she owns, bribes a nurse and takes her sister out of the asylum while Walter is abroad. Then she hands the case over, for the sake of the formula the book began with. That gap between the slogan and the evidence is the most interesting thing in it.

The shape of the book

The form is a trial that cannot be held. “Thus, 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,” Walter explains, and nothing is to be “related on hearsay evidence”. Collins, who had trained at Lincoln’s Inn, divides the book into three Epochs, each passed from hand to hand. In the First, Walter gives way to Gilmore and then to Marian’s diary. The Second runs from the diary at Blackwater to Mr Fairlie, the housekeeper Mrs Michelson, a cook, a doctor, a layer-out of the dead and “The Narrative of the Tombstone”, which consists of the inscription alone (Second Epoch). The Third belongs to Walter, broken by Mrs Catherick’s letter and Fosco’s confession.

The structure is also a clock. Every witness in the Second Epoch swears to what they saw and no one can swear to the day, and at last the case narrows, in the solicitor’s words, to “the proof by comparison of dates”. The certificate says Lady Glyde died on 25 July 1850. Walter must show she was alive to reach London the day after, and his proof is an entry in a livery stable’s order book (Conclusion, ch. I). For a story with so much moonlight, its climax is clerical work, and that is the point.

The voices

The witnesses are the book’s great pleasure, and each is comic or chilling in a way that also serves as testimony. Mr Fairlie, the invalid uncle who has let his niece be buried rather than be disturbed, writes: “It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone” and describes himself as “nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man” (Fairlie). Mrs Michelson, a clergyman’s widow, is pious, loyal and wrong about everything, and she goes on trusting the Count to the end of her statement (Michelson). Hester Pinhorn cannot write and signs “Her + Mark” (Pinhorn). Mrs Catherick has climbed back from disgrace to respectability, and her triumph is: “The clergyman bows to me” (Third Epoch, ch. VIII).

Fosco’s prose is the summit. He has the fullest vocabulary in the novel and no shame, and he treats English morality as a set of copy-book headings: “Crimes cause their own detection, do they?” he asks two ladies in a boathouse, and tells them to “Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns” (Marian, Second Epoch, ch. III). He is as good as explaining his method to the women he means to rob.

Who reads the diary

The novel’s most shocking page has no violence on it. Marian climbs out of a window in the rain, crawls along the verandah roof and overhears Glyde and Fosco plotting below (Second Epoch, ch. IX). She writes it all down in a mounting fever, the sentences break up, and the diary stops. Then a new hand takes over, under the heading “POSTSCRIPT BY A SINCERE FRIEND”: “The illness of our excellent Miss Halcombe has afforded me the opportunity of enjoying an unexpected intellectual pleasure.” Fosco has read everything, including her suspicions of him, and he compliments her on it. “Admirable woman!” he adds (ch. X).

The reader has been inside Marian’s head for hundreds of pages, and now it turns out the villain has been reading over the same shoulder and enjoying it just as much. The moment is a violation, and it is also the only unforced tribute she receives. Fosco alone does her justice, which is one reason he wins readers over against their judgement.

There is a quieter parallel. An editor’s footnote to the diary says: “The passages omitted, here and elsewhere, in Miss Halcombe’s Diary are only those which bear no reference to Miss Fairlie” (First Epoch). So the book has an editor as well, and he has cut her too. The editor is Walter, who gathered the statements and arranged them, and who ends up married to the heiress, with his infant son presented, by Marian, as “the Heir of Limmeridge” (Conclusion, ch. III). The drawing master hired at four guineas a week has won the house. Collins does not treat him as a fraud. But a reader who has learnt from this novel how evidence is assembled should notice who assembled this.

The people

Marian Halcombe

Marian is one of the great Victorian heroines, and Walter introduces her with an ambush. He sees a lovely figure from behind and is thrilled, and she turns: “The lady is ugly!” Her skin is dark, and “the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache” (Hartright, ch. VI). Then she talks, and is funny, frank and quicker than anyone else in the room. The novel never lets her marry, and it ends by calling her “the good angel of our lives”, which is both a thanksgiving and a way of filing her.

Count Fosco

Fosco is immensely fat and light on his feet, with white mice in his waistcoat, canaries on his fingers and a cockatoo on his shoulder. He subdues a savage dog by staring it down, asks gravely for a fourth tart, and rules his wife and his friend. His one fear is the secret Brotherhood he has betrayed, which is how Walter, through his friend Pesca, finally gets a grip on him. The body in the Paris Morgue, its arm cut with a T for “Traditore”, is his.

Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick

Laura is the novel’s known weakness, a heroine described mainly by what she lacks. Walter first asks the reader to supply her: “Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you.” After the asylum she is treated, tenderly, as a child. Walter and Marian secretly buy her drawings so that she can feel she earns, “the poor, faint, valueless sketches, of which I was the only purchaser” (Third Epoch, ch. VIII). Anne is her half-sister and shadow, and the woman of the title appears in very few scenes. She promised Mrs Fairlie, as a child, “I will always wear white as long as I live”, and she dies believing she has a secret she never understood. When the stone is corrected at the end, her whole life comes down to “Anne Catherick, July 25th, 1850.”

Sir Percival Glyde

Glyde is a plausible gentleman with a short temper and no right to anything he owns. He is illegitimate, and to borrow on his estate he forged his parents’ marriage into a parish register. Walter assumes the secret is an affair with Mrs Catherick, and it proves to be a crime of paperwork. He burns to death trying to destroy the register in a locked vestry, with Walter outside trying to get him out (Third Epoch, ch. X).

How it was made

Collins was thirty-five, long a colleague of Charles Dickens, when the serial began in Dickens’s weekly All the Year Round on 26 November 1859, taking up where A Tale of Two Cities left off, and it ran until August 1860, with Harper’s Weekly carrying it in America. Sampson Low brought it out in three volumes that month.

His materials were close to hand. The plot of substitution is partly drawn from an eighteenth-century case of abduction and false imprisonment that he found in Maurice Méjan’s Recueil des causes célèbres. The asylum had immediate force: Louisa Nottidge had been carried off to one by her family, and the novel’s dedication went to Bryan Procter, a Commissioner in Lunacy. Married women in England could not yet protect their own property; the Act that settled this came in 1882. Walter’s trade came from Collins’s father, the painter William Collins, and the Italians from two childhood years in Italy. In 1858 he had set up house with Caroline Graves and her daughter, unmarried, and he remained no friend to the institution he shows here at its worst.

The date on which the plot turns was itself wrong. In The Times on 30 October 1860, E. S. Dallas showed that Laura’s journey to London could not have happened when the book said. Collins admitted it to his publisher, adding that “readers are not critics who test an emotional book by the base rules of arithmetic”, and the chronology was mended in the one-volume edition of 1861.

Readers and critics

The success of The Woman in White was a public event. By November 1860 there had been eight three-volume editions, and shops sold Woman in White cloaks, bonnets, perfumes, waltzes and quadrilles. Prince Albert read it, Thackeray lost a day to it and Gladstone missed the theatre for it. Edward FitzGerald thought of naming a boat after Marian. Reviewers mostly sniffed, though Margaret Oliphant, no friend of the school it founded, was unusually warm. Vanity Fair in 1872 drew Collins as “The Novelist who invented Sensation”; Henry Mansel’s verdict on such books in the Quarterly was that they produced “that sensation in the palate and throat which is a premonitory symptom of nausea”.

Collins knew what he had done: his chosen epitaph at Kensal Green calls him “Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction”. T. S. Eliot’s essay “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” (1927) took him seriously as a craftsman, though its famous praise went to The Moonstone. The modern reading turns on D. A. Miller’s “Cages aux folles” (1986), which reads the book’s nervous thrills as bound up with Victorian anxieties about masculinity. The novel is now a set text.

Afterlives

The Surrey Theatre had a melodrama running in 1860, and Collins’s own version came to the Olympic in 1871. When Whistler’s White Girl appeared in 1862, viewers connected it with the novel. In the 1948 Warner Brothers film Sydney Greenstreet is Fosco and Eleanor Parker plays both Laura and Anne. The BBC has returned to it repeatedly, with Tara Fitzgerald as Marian in 1997 and Jessie Buckley in 2018. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical opened at the Palace Theatre in 2004, with Michael Crawford as Fosco, in a fat suit that made him ill. Novelists answer it too: James Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001) is a sequel, and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) takes the switched heiress and the madhouse and gives the women back their own plot.

How to read it

Read it in instalments if you can. It was built for weekly suspense.
Ask of each witness what they stand to gain. Then ask it of Walter.
Keep a note of the dates. The last hundred pages reward it.
Do not rush the Second Epoch’s small narratives. They are short, and their flatness is the horror.
Choose an annotated edition. John Sutherland’s in Oxford World’s Classics, Matthew Sweet’s in Penguin and the Broadview edition by Maria Bachman and Don Richard Cox add the notes this text lacks. The Gutenberg text linked here is complete.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868). The same relay of witnesses put to work on a jewel theft, and a cleaner plot.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853). The law as weather, with a double narrative and a buried identity of its own.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The best-known imitator, in which the woman with the false identity is the one to fear.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892). The rest cure told from inside the locked room, which Collins never quite enters.
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002). The modern answer to the book, and a double-cross the original would have admired.