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| Ms. Hen on the porch with the Nose |
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
All the Year Round
1860
Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she wanted to
read a book on her phone while she was at work, and this was inexpensive for
her Kindle app. She didn’t realize how long it was when she started reading it,
and it was difficult for her to read such a lengthy book on her phone! She will
not make that mistake again. She liked the book, but the way she read it was
frustrating to her.
This novel is considered one of the first sensational novels
and the first detective novels. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were friends,
but Collins’ fame has diminished over the twentieth century and beyond, while Dickens’
has not. They both wrote serialized novels; THE WOMAN IN WHITE was published
this way between November 1859 and August 1860. It is written in the epistolary
form.
This novel is about a young man named Walter Hartright, a
drawing instructor, who starts teaching at a house where two young women live
with their uncle, and on the way there, he meets a woman dressed in white who
she says escaped from an asylum. He is frightened, and he wants to help her,
but she goes away. Hartright teaches at the house, and falls in love with one
of his students, Laura Fairlie, but she is engaged to someone else. He leaves,
heartbroken, and Laura’s sister Marian consoles him. He embarks a ship destined
for the Americas where he is to be a cartographer in the New World.
Laura gets married to Sir Percival Glyde and travels to
Italy after their wedding. When they come home, they bring Count Fosco and his
wife, Laura’s aunt, to their house. Marian comes to live with them. What occurs
and what is underlying in the story is complicated and twists and turns, and
Ms. Hen had a hard time following it sometimes. There are a lot of secrets
involved in the novel.
Ms. Hen liked this novel, but she thinks she would have
enjoyed it more had she not read it on her phone. It is reminiscent of Charles
Dickens, in the way things dragged out a lot. Ms. Hen heard that Dickens got
paid by the word, and it must have been the same for Collins. Ms. Hen thinks
that this novel is important because it is historical, and groundbreaking, and
a new literary form is always something to pay attention to and learn from.
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| The view whilst reading The Woman in White |
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