The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Summary
Walter Hartright, a young drawing teacher, meets a distressed woman dressed entirely in white on a moonlit London road one night, helps her on her way, and only afterward learns she has just escaped from an asylum. Days later he arrives at Limmeridge House to tutor Laura Fairlie, who turns out to resemble the woman in white so closely the two could pass for sisters, and Hartright falls in love with his pupil even as she is already promised to Sir Percival Glyde, a baronet whose smooth manners conceal both a hidden financial crisis and a still darker secret about his own birth. Laura's older half sister Marian Halcombe, sharper and more resourceful than anyone else in the book, becomes the reader's real ally as Sir Percival and his friend Count Fosco, a fat, canary loving Italian schemer as charming as he is dangerous, conspire to get at Laura's fortune by secretly swapping her identity with that of the woman in white, Anne Catherick, who dies under Laura's name while Laura herself is confined to the asylum as a supposed lunatic. Marian and Hartright work to free her, and Hartright spends the book's final stretch assembling the proof, and finally forcing Fosco's own written confession, that unravels the conspiracy and restores Laura to her true name.
Collins tells the whole story through a stack of testimonies, letters, and journal entries from different narrators rather than a single voice, a structure meant to read like evidence assembled for a trial, and the device lets the reader piece together a conspiracy no single character can see whole. It moves fast for a three volume Victorian novel and earns its reputation as gripping, propulsive reading, though a reader should expect the sensation novel's taste for coincidence and disguise over strict realism.
Collins drew the identity switch plot from a real case of a woman abducted and confined for her family's financial convenience, and part of the book's outrage runs through Laura's total legal powerlessness once married, since English law at the time gave a husband control of his wife's property outright.
Historical Context & Significance
The Woman in White ran simultaneously in Charles Dickens's All the Year Round in Britain and Harper's Weekly in America through 1859 and 1860, and appeared as a complete novel on 15 August 1860. Contemporary reviewers were often hostile even as the public bought the book in enormous numbers, and its popularity is said to have produced a wave of Woman in White branded goods, with perfumes, cloaks and bonnets often cited, though only the sheet music, a Woman in White waltz and a Fosco galop, has actually been traced.
Modern critics rank it among Collins's finest work; Robert McCrum placed it 23rd on his list of the hundred greatest novels in 2003, and the BBC's Big Read poll ranked it 77th. Collins thought enough of the book to choose, for his own epitaph, only the words "author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction." It remains widely read as one of the founding texts of the Victorian sensation novel.