Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Wilkie Collins

  ‘Child!’ she exclaimed, with all her easy gaiety of old times. ‘Do you talk in that familiar manner of one of the landed gentry of England? Are you aware, when I present this illustrious baby to your notice, in whose presence you stand? Evidently not! Let me make two eminent personages known to one another: Mr. Walter Hartright—the Heir of Limmeridge.’

  So she spoke. In writing those last words, I have written all. The pen falters in my hand; the long, happy labour of many months is over! Marian was the good angel of our lives—let Marian end our Story.

  THE END

  ENDNOTES

  1 To Bryan Waller Procter: Collins dedicated his novel to this English poet and biographer (1787-1874), who wrote under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall. He also practiced as a lawyer in London and served as a metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. Procter likely assisted Collins with details regarding asylums and mental illness in The Woman in White.

  2 (p. 5) Dickens . . . most perfect work of constructive art that has ever proceeded from his pen: Collins refers to A Tale of Two Cities, serialized in All the Year Round from April 30 to November 26, 1859.

  3 (p. 7) solicitor of great experience: Solicitors are British lawyers not permitted to argue cases in court, as do barristers. The solicitor in this case may have been Collins’s lawyer of the 1860s, William Tindell. The lawyer’s anonymity may be just as well, as reviewers took The Woman in White to task for various errors in legal interpretation (see Introduction) .

  4 (p. 11 ) Professor Pesca ... teacher of languages: It is generally assumed that Pesca’s character was based on Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), father of poet Christina Rossetti and of painter, poet, and cofounder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Gabriele Rossetti was a well-known London teacher of Italian and a professor of Italian at King’s College, London. In his native Italy, as a young man, Rossetti had been a member of a secret political society (I Carbonari, or “the Charcoal-burners”) that was committed to overthrowing Napoleonic rule and was active in revolutionary causes.

  5 (p. 41) Chiffoniers, little stands in buhl and marquetterie, loaded with figures in Dresden: Chiffoniers are tall chests of drawers. Buhl is wood furniture inlaid with tortoiseshell and metal; marquetterie is wood furniture inlaid with patterns in colored wood veneers. Dresden figures were dainty porcelains from Dresden, Germany.

  6 (p. 44) Charles the Fifth pick up Titian’s brush: Italian master Tiziano Vecellio (c.1485-1576) was appointed court painter to King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) and created his portraits. According to legend, Charles condescended to pick up a brush Titian had dropped. When the artist protested, the Emperor allegedly replied, “Titian is worthy to be served by Caesar.”

  7 (p. 78) See what Scripture says about dreams: This section cites various Bible verses about the interpretation of dreams: The first (Genesis 40:8) declares that dream interpretation is the provenance of God; the second (Genesis 41:25) narrates Pharaoh’s prophetic dream, interpreted as God’s giving Egypt seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine; the last (Daniel 4:18-25) details King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, as interpreted by the master of his magicians, Belteshazzar, who prophesies the King’s loss of power as a lesson from God, who truly rules the earth.

  8 (p. 214) Pope Alexander the Sixth: Rodrigo Borgia was a corrupt Renaissance pope (served 1492-1503) who sought to increase the papacy’s secular power; he fathered several children, including alleged husband-poisoner Lucretia Borgia.

  9 (p. 214) Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning: George Frederick and Maria Manning murdered Maria’s lover for his money in 1849 and buried him under their kitchen floor. Their public hanging that same year attracted the largest crowd ever to attend one.

  10 (p. 224) Figaro’s famous song in the Barber of Seville: He sings “Largo al Factotum,” a popular aria in which Figaro, the busy, boastful title character of Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini’s comic opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816), introduces himself. The lines quoted below read “Figaro here! Figaro there! Figaro up! Figaro down!” Rossini was one of Collins’s favorite composers.

  11 (p. 232) nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide—your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton: English poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) wrote imitations of medieval romances, which he attributed to Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk he invented. His poverty and suicide (following the rejection of a poem), as well as his devotion to his art, made him a hero to the English Romantic poets. He is memorably and sensuously pictured in Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton, owned by Augustus Egg, a friend of Collins.

  12 (p. 232) “I go—and leave my character behind me”: The quoted line is from London-based Irish playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s popular 1777 play The School for Scandal (act 2, scene 2). It is uttered by Sir Peter Teazle (whose marriage to a young adulterous woman drives the plot) to Lady Sneerwell, a gossip, and implies that he will be discussed after he leaves. The line from the play is: “Your ladyship must excuse me; I’m called away by particular business—but I leave my character behind me.”

  13 (p. 236) Isaac of York: The horse is named for a Jewish moneylender in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819). Isaac is the father of the beautiful, kind Rebecca, Ivanhoe’s forbidden love interest.

  14 (p. 238) I am a Jesuit: Count Fosco compares himself to a Jesuit priest, a member of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic religious order known for its intellectualism and emphasis on education. Jesuits were stereotyped as being over-analytical and thus given to intrigue, false reasoning, and logical loopholes.

  15 (p. 281) in the character of a Man of Sentiment: This is a reference to a typical character type from the eighteenth-century cult of Sentiment; the Man of Sentiment is extremely emotional but honorable, as well as sympathetic and glamorous.

  16 (p. 531) Dorcas Society: These church-related ladies’ charitable sewing circles were inspired by the needlework of Dorcas, a follower of Christ in the Bible whom Saint Peter resurrects from the dead after he sees poor widows wearing garments she had made for them.

  17 (p. 566) your first Charles: The unpopular King Charles I ruled England from 1625 to 1649. He dissolved Parliament to rule for eleven years without its input or checks upon his power; his reign saw the English Civil War and ended with his execution.

  18 (p. 589) Count of the Holy Roman Empire . . . Perpetual Arch-Master of the Rosicrucian Masons of Mesopotamia: Fosco’s mystical credential cobbles together elements from secretive societies and esoteric fringe religious organizations popular in Europe in the nineteenth century. As new lodges based on various combinations were formed continuously to suit the unique needs of the organizers, such titles as Fosco’s, although fictional, would not be extraordinary.

  19 (p. 592) illustrious Newton ... transform Nero . . . Alexander the Great: English physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727) identified the concept of gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree. Decadent Roman emperor Nero (ruled A.D. 54-68) was known for his cruelty. Alexander the Great was a Macedonian king (ruled 336-323 B.C.) known for his bravery and military conquests.

  INSPIRED BY THE WOMAN IN WHITE

  Fiction

  The Woman in White has never been out of print since its initial publication in installments in 1859. At its first appearance, the remarkable story created a buying frenzy among the public, became a consumer brand, and inspired an entirely new genre of writing: the sensation novel. Broadly defined, the sensation novel took the terrors of the Gothic novel, most often set in the Middle Ages or in exotic regions, and moved them to familiar domestic settings. The authors of these novels frequently took bigamy, mental illness, insane asylums, dark secrets, and murder (poisoning, in particular) as the themes around which they constructed plots designed to maximize suspense, fear, and curiosity in readers. The term itself was a pejorative one and was seldom used by its practitioners.

  The sensation novel enjoyed its greatest
popularity in the 1860s. Aside from Collins, Ellen Wood (sometimes known as Mrs. Henry Wood), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Reade were among the genre’s best-known writers. Ellen Wood’s immensely popular first novel, East Lynne (1861), tells the story of Lady Isobel Vane, who deserts her husband to travel abroad with another man. Soon after her paramour abandons her, a terrible train accident disfigures her. She returns to England and serves as a governess to her own children, never revealing her true identity. Marital desertion also forms a central theme of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The protagonist fakes her own death, commits bigamy, and pushes her first husband down a well. She then sets fire to the lodgings of a relative who attempts to expose her crimes, which turn out to have been engendered by a hereditary mental condition. Braddon admitted freely that her novel was inspired by Collins.

  Insanity and asylums were important trappings of the sensation novel. Charles Reade wrote Hard Cash (1863) to expose the awful conditions in insane asylums in Britain. He interwove two plotlines: the wrongful committal of Alfred Hardie by his father, Richard, who wishes to conceal his own banking crimes, and the travails of David Dodd, whose actual insanity was caused by Richard’s scheming. In the conclusion, the author requests that readers report wrongful institutionalizations to the authorities.

  Rosina Bulwer-Lytton wrote the autobiographical A Blighted Life (1880), the actual events of which may have inspired The Woman in White. The narrative records the vicious feud between Rosina and her ex-husband, author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which culminated in Rosina’s wrongful committal in 1858 at his hands (she was released three weeks later after protests from friends). Collins knew the couple, and these events are thought to have influenced the character of Sir Percival Glyde and his confinement of Anne Catherick. Tellingly, Rosina wrote to congratulate Collins on the novel; her husband, Edward, called it “great trash.”

  Charles Dickens’s last novel, the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), adopts sensation conventions and was in part a response to Collins’s second most famous work, The Moonstone (1868), widely regarded as the first detective novel. Fledgling novelist Thomas Hardy wrote the sensational Desperate Remedies (1871) after publishers refused to print his first work, The Poor Man and the Lady; Hardy believed that adherence to a popular format would increase his chance of success.

  Theater

  The Woman in White was so popular upon its initial publication that the Surrey Theatre in London presented an unauthorized adaptation of the novel only three months after the serialization concluded in 1860. In Collins’s own dramatization of the novel, produced in 1871, he moved the most shocking visual action offstage; the play ran from October 9, 1871, until February 24, 1872. Modern stage adaptations include Dan Sutherland’s Mystery at Blackwater (1954), Melissa Murray’s The Woman in White (1988), and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s full-scale musical The Woman in White (2004).

  W S. Gilbert—best known as one-half of Gilbert and Sullivan—parodied the work of Collins in the libretto to the opera A Sensation Novel, with music by German Reed (1871). The story opens in a dilapidated residence; the scene of several murders, it is now the home of a sensation novelist who writes fifty books a year. The characters in the author’s newest volume, however, dislike the parts given to them. They complain about the conventions forced upon them by the sensation genre, which they find demeaning and predictable. Rebelling against forced marriages and trite identity revelations, they summon the author, who is offstage for most of the play, to restore to life a character who has beheaded himself.

  Film

  The earliest days of cinema saw several silent versions: two in 1912, one each in 1914, 1917, and 1929; all kept the original title except the 1914 rendition, entitled The Dream Woman. The elaborate 1948 Woman in White, directed by Peter Godfrey, stars Eleanor Parker in dual roles as Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick. Sydney Greenstreet (The Maltese Falcon) brilliantly plays the sinister Count Fosco, and the legendary Agnes Moorehead takes the small role of his wife. Gig Young plays Walter Hartright, and John Emery and Alexis Smith round out the cast as Sir Percival Glyde and Marian Halcombe. The spot-on acting, along with sophisticated settings and evocative music by Max Steiner, make this movie easy to recommend.

  In 1982 the BBC presented a five-part miniseries of The Woman in White starring Alan Badel as Count Fosco, Deirdra Morris as Anne Catherick, Daniel Gerroll as Walter Hartright, and John Shrapnel as Sir Percival Glyde. Diana Quick steals the show as Marian Halcombe, with Jenny Seagrove as her sister. The series was directed by John Bruce.A 1997 television version, directed by Tim Fywell, features Tara Fitzgerald and Justine Waddell in the roles of Marian and Laura Fairlie. Flawless production design, well-motivated acting, and tightly wrought suspense made this version of Collins’s novel one of the biggest successes of the year for British television, drawing comparisons with the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

  Comments

  CHARLES DICKENS

  I have read [The Woman in White] with great care and attention. There cannot be a doubt that it is a very great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in respect of tenderness. In character it is excellent. Mr. Fairlie as good as the lawyer, and the lawyer as good as he. Mrs. Vesey and Miss Halcombe, in their different ways, equally meritorious. Sir Percival, also, is most skillfully shown, though I doubt (you see what small points I come to) whether any man ever showed uneasiness by hand or foot without being forced by nature to show it in his face too. The story is very interesting, and the writing of it admirable....

  You know what an interest I have felt in your powers from the beginning of our friendship, and how very high I rate them? I know that this is an admirable book, and that it grips the difficulties of the weekly portion and throws them in a masterly style. No one else could do it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing; and I am absolutely certain that you never did half so well yourself.

  —from a letter to Collins (January 7, 1860)

  SATURDAY REVIEW

  Mr. Wilkie Collins is an admirable story-teller, though he is not a great novelist. His plots are framed with artistic ingenuity—he unfolds them bit by bit, clearly, and with great care—and each chapter is a most skilful sequel to the chapter before. He does not attempt to paint character or passion. He is not in the least imaginative. He is not by any means a master of pathos. The fascination which he exercises over the mind of his reader consists in this—that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume. Each part is elaborated only so far as is consistent with its due subordination to the whole. He allows nothing to distract our attention from the narrative, or to induce us to forget that what he is putting before us is a riddle, and has its answer. The great object of the author—the one man who is behind the scenes—is to say what he has got to say so well as to make us follow up the thread he gives us right on to the very end. At the end comes the explanation. The secret spring is touched—the lock flies open—the novel is done. Mr. Wilkie Collins is content to accept from us the kind of homage that a skilful talker extorts from his audience. We have heard him with eager curiosity to the close. We have spent some exciting hours over the charade, and have been at last obliged to come to him in despair for the solution.

  With him, accordingly, character, passion, and pathos are
mere accessory colouring which he employs to set off the central situation in his narrative. All the architecture of his plot tapers to one point, and is to be interpreted by one idea. Men and women he draws, not for the sake of illustrating human nature and life’s varied phases, or exercising his own powers of creation, but simply and solely with reference to the part it is necessary they should play in tangling and disentangling his argument. None of his characters are to be seen looking about them. They are not occupied in the by-play. They are not staring at the spectators, or, if they are, they are staring listlessly and vacantly, like witnesses who are waiting to be called before the court, and have nothing to do until their turn arrives. There they stand, most of them, like ourselves, in rapt attention, on the stretch to take their share in the action of the central group—their eyes bent in one direction—their movement converging upon one centre—half-painted, sketchy figures, grouped with sole relation to the unknown mystery in the middle. The link of interest that binds them is that they are all interested in the great secret. By the time the secret is disclosed, the bond of unity will have been finished—and they will go their own ways in twos and threes, and never meet again....

  Estimated by the standard of great novels, the Woman in White is nowhere.

  —August 25, 1860

  DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE

  In [The Woman in White], which claims a passing notice from the marked disproportion of its actual merits to its seeming popularity, the spirit of modern realism has woven a tissue of scenes more wildly improbable than the fancy of an average idealist would have ventured to inflict on readers beyond their teens. Mr. W Collins has for some years been favourably known to the general reader as a painstaking manufacturer of stories, short or long, whose chief merit lies in the skilful elaboration of a startling mystery traceable to some natural cause, but baffling all attempts to solve it until the author himself has given us the right clue. Some praise is also due to him for the care with which these literary puzzles are set off by a correct if not very natural style, a pleasing purity of moral tone, and a certain knack of hitting the more superficial traits of character. When we have said all we can for him, we have said nothing that would entitle him to a higher place among English novelists, than the compiler of an average school-history would enjoy among English historians. But to a higher place he seems ambitious to rise, if his readers would only estimate his last performance as highly as he does himself. At any rate, he has tried his best to make the world a partner in his own illusions. The Woman in White opens with a grand flourish on the author’s own trumpet, and echoes of the same sweet music greet us ever and anon throughout the work. That many have thus been lured to take him at his own valuing, is likely and natural enough; and the pleasure that comes to most of us in reading a story full of movement and strange surprises, will often be enhanced by contrast with the surfeiting effects of certain other tales wherewith the genius of a great living novelist has made us too familiar. But to us it seemed as if all this self-approval rendered us the more alive to the author’s weakness, even in those very points where he had hitherto come out best. If he has never yet succeeded in writing a noteworthy novel, he has signally failed for once in that field of mechanical excellence which redeemed his former essays from utter neglect....