The Woman in White

By Wilkie Collins

“This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”

One evening the young drawing master Walter Hartright, who has taken a job at Limmeridge House in Cumberland teaching Laura Fairlie and her half-sister Marian to sketch, encounters a woman dressed all in white on a dark London street. After helping her finding a taxi, he overhears the conversation of men looking for her and realised she has escaped from an insane asylum.

At Limmeridge House both Marian and Laura fall in love with Walter, but Walter only has eyes for Laura. However, Laura has made a promise to her deceased father to marry Sir Percival Glyde, whom she is engaged to. Glyde's motives for the marriage, on the other hand, are suspect, especially as his partner in crime is a flamboyant medical man, the eccentric, but oh so mysterious, count Fusco. It is him who thinks up the evil plan of substituting Laura with ‘the woman in white’, consequently robbing her of her money, and also him who, in the end, carries the plan out.

The Woman in White is a good tale, although the over-use of narrative instead of dialogue makes the book very long and ‘over-written’. There are several different narratives as well and this was one of the things that annoyed me a bit about this story at first. It did grow on me as I kept reading though, and after a while I started to enjoy it.

It is a great Victorian mystery novel and, because of the way it is written (the story is told through different narratives, from letters to diary entries), you get the story from many different angles. This is something that making it more intricate and, in my opinion, more fun, but also more confusing, to read.