Book written by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1860.
It all begins with a midnight encounter with the ghostly woman. She is living flesh and bone, but she is clothed head to toe in white and surrounded by an aura of secrecy and mystery. The only thing Mr. Walter Hartright knows for certain is that this woman, though strange in her manner and circumstance, is gentle, gracious, and altogether harmless. What this humble drawing master could not have anticipated then was the thrilling adventure of crime and scandal this one encounter would set in motion.
As far as British mystery thrillers go, allow me to provide some context: Twenty-eight years before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle debuted his iconic hero, Sherlock Holmes, readers of London newspapers were feasting on the story of The Woman in White, which was first published as a novel in 1860. Before the emergence of detective novels and whodunit stories, readers were gripped by sensation fiction, and Wilkie Collins is considered a master of this genre. Sensation fiction and Gothic fiction are very similar in that both use shock and suspense in their stories, but sensation novels—unlike the Gothic—refrain from using any supernatural elements. It’s like the soap operas today’s audiences enjoy; stories that are juicy and scandalous, but rooted in the improbable, not the impossible.
I first read The Woman in White for an AP Lang paper in my junior year of high school. At that time, I was excited by the fact that I could mostly keep up with what was going on. (If you were to ask me anything about Persuasion by Jane Austen, which I also read that year, I couldn’t tell you the main character’s name let alone give you a summary. So, The Woman in White was kind of a big deal for me.) What’s kept me coming back and rereading this one has been the craftiness of the mystery and the execution of the storytelling. The novel is written as a series of narratives and testimonials from a number of witnesses, and all of those perspectives work together to tell the true story. It’s a novel that keeps you on your toes with lots of unknown factors that could set the main storyline off in a completely different direction. If you enjoy a good mystery or period drama, I recommend giving this work of classic literature a read.
This book contains violence including kidnapping and domestic abuse.
Spoiler alert! If you don’t want me to tell you the ending, you can skip this part.
"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."
So many secrets and scandals! I usually have trouble keeping them all straight, and there’s usually at least one that I completely forget about and then rediscover. This time around, it was the theory that Anne Catherick’s father could very well be Philip Fairlie, which would make her Laura Fairlie’s other half-sister. No proof for that particular idea was ever discovered or disclosed, but the idea that Anne could have another family made me sad. Laura, Marian, and Walter would have gladly welcomed Anne into their lives if she had made it out the other side of this ordeal. And for everything that Anne sacrificed to try and bring some justice to herself and protection for Laura, it seems sad that she didn’t get a happily ever after like the other characters did. Instead, she died alone in the enemy’s house. There was some conciliation that she was at least buried next to Mrs. Fairlie, whom Anne adored and looked up to.
With this particular readthrough, I started to doubt the claimed brilliance of Count Fosco’s plan. The more I thought about it, his whole idea to switch Laura’s and Anne’s identities and pose one for the other seemed unnecessary, overcomplicated, and had one fatal flaw. If the whole idea was to silence these two women who potentially knew Sir Percival’s secret, then it would do just as well to return Anne to the Asylum and murder Laura. Anne was already discredited and no one would take her claims seriously, and Laura’s health was in decline from the stress of trying to stay close to an ill Marian—it wouldn’t have been impossible for anyone to believe that poor Laura just couldn’t handle the strain (as a matter of fact, people did believe that). I reasoned that maybe it all came down to the fact that Anne had already escaped the Asylum once before. That singular detail indicates that Anne is decidedly a stronger character than Laura. Anne was determined not to live her life locked in a cage, and if she escaped once, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t do it again. Laura, though commendable in her strength through such a traumatic experience, lacked the same determination and would probably have remained at the Asylum had Marian not swooped in and saved the day.
Hence, the fatal flaw in Fosco’s plan. Fosco doesn’t really respect women—or people in general—but he showed great admiration for Marian. Fosco never voiced exactly why he was so fond of Marian; I suspect he believed that Marian’s intellect was the only one he had ever encountered that could rival his own. This makes it particularly interesting that such a self-proclaimed genius would merely tip his hat to her in recognition and not prepare against her. If Fosco admired her strong resolve and her commitment to the truth, then he should have anticipated that Marian would have eventually found the Asylum and discovered Laura instead of Anne. And he should have anticipated that a living, breathing Laura was all the evidence that Marian would need to pursue justice and expose him and Percival. I suppose I can’t say for certain, but I believe that Fosco and Percival would have been in a much better hiding place if they had sent Anne back to the Asylum and murdered Laura. This mystery relies solely on witnesses' statements, and if all of the witnesses agree that Laura died, and Marian can’t challenge that, then, logically, Fosco and Percival’s deception remains unquestionable. Not that I’m encouraging the villains here, but you get the point.
What do you guys think? Was Fosco as brilliant as he seemed or did he get ahead of himself?
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