The Woman in

White
A few points
 William Wilkie Collins
WILKIE COLLINS was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the
landscape painter William Collins. In 1846, having spent five years in
the tea business, he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn,
where he gained the legal knowledge that was to give him much
material for his writing. His work includes short stories, plays, journalism,
and biography, but it is on his 23 novels that his reputation rests. His first
novel, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850) brought him to the
attention of Charles Dickens, who became a close friend. However, it
was with The Woman in White (1860) that Collins established his
reputation, and the high-impact genre known as sensation fiction. No
Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868) also
achieved huge popularity. His unconventional lifestyle remained a
secret from his reading public. Although he remained unmarried, he
lived with a young widow, Caroline Graves, and her daughter, from
1858. By 1868 he had established a second mistress, Martha Rudd (who
bore him three children) in separate lodgings. During the 1870s he
returned to the theatre, producing stage versions of his novels. Much of
his later fiction was planned with dramatic adaptation in mind.
Important novels of this period – which saw a new emphasis on social
commentary – include Man and Wife (1870), Poor Miss Finch (1872),
The Law and the Lady (1875), Heart and Science (1883) and The
Legacy of Cain (1888). Collins died in 1889. His final novel, Blind Love
(1890) was completed by his friend Sir Walter Besant.
 Publication History
✓ The Woman in White first appeared in forty weekly installments
in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round, from 26
November 1859 until 25 August 1860.
✓ The Woman in White was also serialized simultaneously in the
United States in Harper’s Weekly, 26 November 1859 to 4
August, 1860.
✓ Sampson Low proceeded to publish an unillustrated three-
volume edition of The Woman in White on 15 or 16 August
1860, before the last installment of the serialization had
appeared. Although the serialized novel was broken in three
uneven “parts” (with the second part beginning at the point
that Walter, Marian, and Laura set up house together in
London, and the third part beginning after the receipt of the
letter from Major Donthorne), the new edition broke the novel
into more nearly equal sections (with the first volume ending
at the point of Laura’s wedding, and the second volume
ending with Walter’s startling encounter at Laura’s grave).
 Publication History
✓ At about the same time as the three-volume edition
appeared in London, a one-volume American edition was
published by Harper and Brothers. The Harper edition may
have appeared a few days before the British edition and is
sometimes cited as the true first edition of the novel.
✓ The one-volume British edition of the novel was published
by Sampson Low in 1861. According to Collins’s own note,
sales of the three-volume edition ended in February 1861,
and the one-volume edition appeared shortly thereafter in
April 1861.
✓ According to Collins’s own account, the novel was begun
at Broadstairs on 15 August 1859, and finished almost one
year later on 26 July 1860. The complete manuscript, 490
pages including Collins’s note on the novel’s composition,
is held by the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
 The Craze
✓ The Woman in White was consumed as breathlessly as
any other product of Victorian sensation culture. The
progress of the plot became a dinner-table topic and
bets were struck on the outcome of this or that
situation. Collins received letters from single men
demanding to know the identity of the original for his
heroine Marian Halcombe, and if she would accept
their hand in marriage.
✓ A merchandising industry geared up to cash in on the
popularity of the novel. Loyal fans could spray
themselves with Woman in White perfume, wrap up in
Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and dance to
various Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles.
 The Craze
✓ During its serialization, crowds besieged the All the Year Round
offices on the day a new number was issued. The management of
the Surrey Theatre rushed a pirated stage adaptation into
production, much to the author’s displeasure. Walter was revived as
a popular name for babies by parents enamoured of the admirable
qualities of the book’s hero, Walter Hartright. The principal villain had
his admirers, too. Fosco became a favourite moniker for cats.
✓ The future Prime Minister William Gladstone cancelled a theatre
engagement in order to continue reading it. The poet Edward
Fitzgerald read it at least five times, and considered naming his
herring-lugger Marian Halcombe, ‘after the brave girl in the story’.
Thackeray spent a whole day absorbed in the novel. Prince Albert
was a great admirer, and sent a copy to the royal family’s most
trusted adviser, Baron Stockmar. The Duc d’Aumale admired Emil
Forgues’s translation La Femme En Blanc so much that he wrote to
Collins “in raptures”.
✓ The serialized publication of The Woman in White resulted in a
massive boost in the sales of All the Year Round which soared to as
high as 100,000 copies. No one was better than Wilkie Collins in
carrying out the maxim he himself invented: “Make ’em laugh,
make ’em cry, make ’em wait.”
 Contemporary Issues
Contemporary events and issues determined both the plot and the
reception of the story.
✓ The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 - Important as it ostensibly made
divorce less difficult (although certainly not easy), it gave rise to fiction
sensationalizing issues of “modern life” such as adultery, bigamy, crime,
and—most of all—secrets.
✓ The English Common Law of Coverture - Coverture was justified by the
widespread belief that women needed protection, such that a woman,
once married, forfeited her legal existence, and in effect, lost all
protection. Under common law, a husband gained absolute control of
his wife’s property, income, and body, as well as custody of their
children. And it was not until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870
and 1882 that personal property was gradually extended and granted
to married women. Indeed, in The Woman in White after Laura Fairlie
marries, her property, social position, and identity are subsumed by her
husband, Sir Percival Glyde. Marian Halcombe perhaps best sums up
marriage for women as a death-in-life existence. After Laura’s wedding
nuptials, Marian prophetically laments that “writing of her marriage [is]
like the writing of her death.
 Contemporary Issues
✓ The formation of the “Select Committee of Commons on the
Operations and the Acts and Regulations for the Care and
Treatment of Lunatics and their Property,” - A result of the furore
occasioned by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s shenanigans when the
novelist and politician in waiting got her wife Rosina detained in a
mental asylum by influencing two doctors to certify that she is
insane. It was only later after Rosina’s friends raised hue and cry
over her incarceration that a new committee of doctors was
constituted where she was found to be perfectly normal and
subsequently released from the asylum.
✓ Penny newspapers, made possible by the repeal of the
Newspaper Stamp Tax in 1856, encroached upon the circulation
figures of the conservative The Times by filling their pages with
accounts of sensational crimes. Such hack-written sensation
stories relating to the adventures of bloodthirsty highwaymen,
detectives and pirates surely moulded the taste of the reading
public.
 Contemporary Issues
✓ There is no doubt that much of the excitement of the novel for its
readers of 1859–60 carried over from a spectacular series of poison
trials in the 1850s. In addition to the Palmer trial (1856) in which
Collins like Dickens took personal interest in, there were Madeleine
Smith, tried and acquitted for killing her lover with arsenic-laced
chocolate in 1857, and Dr Thomas Smethurst, cleared of poisoning
his wife in 1858, but nailed on a subsequent (and probably
trumped-up) charge of bigamy.
✓ In numerous other ways, The Woman in White reverberates to topics
of the day. As Catherine Peters points out, London in 1859 was
crawling with Neapolitan spies. In 1851—when the climax of the
novel’s action takes place—it was crawling with French spies, over
in England on the pretext of visiting the Great Exhibition (that Fosco
is a spy is also confirmed in his final testament, though which foreign
country he is serving is left vague). Pesca and Fosco, dwarf and fat
man, monsters of benign and malign deformity, testify to British
fascination with Italy in 1860—the period in which the newest
European state was being born in war, conspiracy, and political
crime. Marian’s typhus infection at Blackwater recalls the great
epidemic of 1849–50, when many of London’s great lakes were
drained (as with the aptly named Blackwater Park, it was assumed
that stagnant water bred the disease).
 Source
✓ Clyde K. Hyder has established the most plausible
source for the story as Maurice Méjan’s Receuil des
Causes Célèbre (1808), a kind of French Newgate
Calendar that Collins had picked up from a Paris
bookstall in 1856.
✓ The essence of Collins’s plot can be found within
Méjan’s collection in the case of Mme de Douhault, a
woman whose identity was “stolen” from her after she
had been drugged and then placed in an asylum
under a false name. She was presumed dead and her
estate passed on to her heirs. She was never able to
regain her property or her legal identity.
 Source
✓ The signature scene of the novel, the scene
where Walter Hartright comes across the eponymous
woman in white, which Charles Dickens considered to
be one of the two most dramatic descriptions in
literature, has been drawn from a celebrated incident
that allegedly occurred in the late 1850s. Something
similar to what happened to Walter Hartright happened
to Collins himself. As noted down for posterity by the son
of the novelist's friend, the painter John Millais, it was in a
similar strange eerie night that Collins bumped into his
future life-partner Caroline Elizabeth Graves. The
“beautiful moonlight night,” “piercing scream,” and
“beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes” all are
reminiscent of the Walter Hartright scene.
 Narrative Structure
The narrative structure of The Woman in White is an important area of
critical discussion and Collins himself seems to have emphasized it a
lot.
✓ The story is told through multiple narrators. As Walter Hartright, the
novel’s primary narrator makes it clear at the very beginning, “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—with the same object, in both cases, to present the
truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to
trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the
persons who have been most closely connected with them, at
each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for
word.”
✓ In the Preface to the French edition he tells us how he came up
with the idea. It was after witnessing a trial that he felt that such a
narration will lend a ring of credibility to the story. “As I listened to
the proceedings … I was struck by the dramatic nature of the
unfolding of the story then being submitted to the scrutiny of the
magistracy through successive depositions by the witnesses being
heard in turn.”
 Narrative Structure
✓ But where Collins may have exceeded his brief is when he makes the
point that this is something new and extraordinary by itself. In the
Preface to the three-volume edition he says, “An experiment is
attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto
tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the
characters of the book. They are all placed in different positions along
the chain of events; and they all take the chain up in turn, and carry it
on to the end.” Surely, he should have known of the existence of
Wuthering Heights, if not of other novels using the same technique.
✓ The important thing, however, as Collins stresses in the same preface is
that he has not used the technique as a fad but because he thought
it was essential to the context of the story. “If the execution of this idea
had led to nothing more than the attainment of mere novelty of form, I
should not have claimed a moment’s attention for it in this place. But
the substance of the book, as well as the form, has profited by it has
afforded my characters a new opportunity of expressing themselves,
through the medium of the written contributions which they are
supposed to make to the progress of the narrative”.
 Narrative Structure
✓ The most important point about the narrative technique has,
however, been made by later critics. They question the validity and
authenticity of the narrators themselves and how far we can take
their words as true. During the course of The Woman in White, its
narrators are attacked, drugged, tricked and terrified. Their
subjective accounts of these harrowing experiences position the
reader in the same disadvantaged position. Narrators like Marian
Halcombe and Walter Hartright collapse into silence, leaving the
reader with a page of blank text, a line of asterisks, a question
unanswered until the next volume or serial number. Unpoliced by
any narrator, they are also free to lie to us. Count Fosco’s testimony
contains obvious untruths. Might Walter’s account of himself also
contain deliberate errors, elisions or self-justifying fictions? How do
we know that their narratives are not misleadingly partial, or if they
have been tampered with by a third party? The formalist critic
Tzvetan Todorov defined the ‘suspense novel’ as one in which the
narrator abandons his or her objectivity and is ‘integrated into the
universe of the other characters’. However, in the sensation
narrative, the immunity of the reader is also dismantled.
 The Woman Question
The Woman Question is important in The Woman in White in multiple ways.
✓ Collins moves away from stereotypical notions of gender by drawing a
character like Marian Halcombe who gives a lie to the normal passive
women characters of the day. She takes on Count Fosco in his lair so
to speak and stand besides Walter Hartright rock solid, thus showing
her iron will. In appearance also she confounds gender expectations
by not being an epitome of feminine vulnerability but by exuding
masculine firmness. And in expressing unabashedly masculine
domination: “Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our
peace—they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’
friendship—they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our
helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel”, she
minces no words.
✓ The novel also contains a serious critique of marriage. Throughout the
novel, Collins shatters the myth of the domestic sphere as a repository
of peace, security, and moral values. Indeed, Limmeridge House is
anything but a safe haven from the outside world; it is the site, rather,
where a husband is well within his legal rights to exercise an absolute
and sinister power over his wife. The change in Madam Fosco after her
marriage is another example of the debilitating influence of marriage
on women.
 Criticism
✓ Nobody ever leaves one of Collins’s tales unfinished.
This is a great compliment to his skill. But then very few
feel at all inclined to read them a second time. Our
curiosity once satisfied, the charm is gone. All that is left
us is to admire the art with which the curiosity was
excited. Probably he himself would hardly expect us to
use his books as we use really great books—for
companions of our solitude. His are works not so much
for the library as for the circulating library. We should
prefer hiring them out as we hire out a Chinese
conjuror—for the night. As soon as we have found out
the secret of his tricks, and admired the clever way in
which he does them, we send him home again. (The
Saturday Review)
 Criticism
✓ When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do
not very much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so
to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans
everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the
beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see
that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing which does
not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The construction is
most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the
taste of the construction. (Trollope)
✓ I seem to have noticed, here and there, that the great pains
you take express themselves a trifle too much, and you know
that I always contest your disposition to give an audience
credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of
points on their attention, and which I have always observed
them to resent when they find it out—as they always will and
do. (Dickens)
 Criticism
✓ The unkindest cut of all was however, not close friend and
mentor Charles Dickens’ criticism. It came from a nondescript
reviewer E.S. Dallas who in his review that appeared in The
Times on 30 October, pointed out an inconsistency in the
novel’s dates. Dallas, who apparently read the novel more
carefully than thousands of other readers did, stated flatly that
the mistaken dates “render the last volume a mockery, a
delusion, and a snare; and all the incidents in it are not merely
improbable—they are absolutely impossible.” Collins was
stung by this criticism of the novel that had made him famous,
particularly when the attack centered on the details of the
plot of which he was so justly proud. He then set about
correcting the problems. The changes he made were fairly
extensive, and involved changing dates as well as rewriting a
number of passages. Still, for all his labours, discrepancy about
dates still remain in the novel.
 The first detective novel
✓ Collins studied law in his early twenties, but left it to pursue his
creative aspirations.
✓ This dalliance with law may have planted the seed for his
interest in the detective genre.
✓ His The Moonstone (1868) by general consent is regarded as
the first detective novel following on the footsteps of Edgar
Allan Poe, the first writer of detective stories. While Poe’s
stories are relatively simple in terms of plot, Collins’ book is far
more complex and challenging.
✓ The Woman in White (1860) an earlier novel may not be
detective fiction in the strict sense of the term but in Walter
Hartright, it possesses a character who employs a number of
techniques that became part of the sleuthing skill-set and an
established feature in later detective novels including those
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
 Afterlife
✓ The novel has never been out of print since its first publication in 1859.
✓ The novel spawned the new genre of sensation fiction. As Mrs. Oliphant,
in a review of May 1862 in Blackwood’s Magazine pointed out, “It
cannot be denied that a most striking and original effort, sufficiently
individual to be capable of originating a new school in fiction, has been
made”.
✓ Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, Charles Reade, later
sensation fiction writers, all acknowledged their debt to Collins. Braddon
regarded Collins as “assuredly [her] literary father” and admitted that
the plot of Lady Audley’s Secret owed much to The Woman in White.
✓ The novel can be referred to as an early example of detective novel
and its protagonist Walter Hartright, a sleuth after the fashion of later
detectives.
✓ The novel also saw dramatic adaptations, both pirated and a later one
authorized and written by Collins himself. Just as the novel, the dramatic
adaptation was a major hit with the public though Collins had to
compress the novel severely keeping in mind the scope of the stage
thus cutting down on some of the iconic scenes of the novel.