The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (week 2)

The Woman in White (1859) is a classic mystery novel that has been adapted into several films, TV shows, and musicals. TIME Magazine listed it among "The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time"; Robert McCrum of The Observer ranked it #23 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time"; and it was listed at #77 on the "The Big Read," BBC's survey of the U.K.'s best-loved novels.

The book tells the story of Walter Hartright, a young art teacher who encounters a mysterious woman dressed in white on a moonlit road. He soon becomes entangled in a web of secrets, lies, and romance involving two sisters, Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe, and the sinister Sir Percival Glyde.

The author, Wilkie Collins, was a law student whose novels drew extensively on his legal training. Just as testimony "is told in Court by more than one witness," so The Woman in White is conveyed through multiple perspectives--weaving ingenious narrative technique with intricate plot construction, masked identities, psychological drama, and supernatural intrigue.

The novel's inciting incident is said to have been inspired by a real-life meeting between Collins and "a woman dressed in flowing white robes escaping from a villa... where she had been kept prisoner under mesmeric influence." The ghostly apparition haunts the characters and reader alike, like an ambiguous God or Devil (ala the spectral face that haunts Pierre, or the whiteness of Moby-Dick).

The Woman in White was a pioneer of the "sensation novel": a genre characterized by shocking subject matter--adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction, murder, etc.--particularly as a scandalization of the upper classes. It emerged as a progenitor and subversion of "silver fork" novels, challenging stereotypes of gender, class, and identity as they had come to be defined through 19th century trends in physiognomy and demography.

Schedule:

• Week 1 (February 2nd): "The Story Begun by Walter Hartright" & "The Story Continued by Vincent Gilmore"
• Week 2 (February 9th): "The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe" in the First Epoch and "The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe" in the Second Epoch
• Week 3 (February 23rd): "The Story Continued by Frederick Fairlie, Esq." to "The Story Concluded by Walter Hartright"

The Woman in White:

• Google books
• Gutenberg
• Standard ebooks
• Librivox 25.5 hrs

Supplemental:

• The Woman in White 1997 movie
• The Woman in White 1948 theatrical trailer
• The Woman in White soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Weber

Extracts:

• "...never a word did he utter; but grinning from ear to ear, and with his white cotton robe streaming in the moonlight, he looked more like the spook of the island than anything mortal." (Omoo, 42)
• "One day... I was startled by a sunny apparition. It was that of a beautiful young Englishwoman, charmingly dressed, and mounted upon a spirited little white pony.... But she proved to be a phantom..." (Omoo, 78)
• "—bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there;—And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—" (Moby-Dick, 42)
• "—were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror." (Moby-Dick, 42)

This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.