Shirley Curran
A friend said he was reading Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and finding it spellbinding. Could a novel written a hundred and fifty years ago be so thrilling that it was impossible to put down? It was the most popular 19th century novel and it is easy to understand why.
It is a cliffhanger. The heroines cope with the threat of murder. There’s a fatal fire. One of them is incarcerated in an asylum. The villains are arch criminals. And yet the whole story fits together like a well made jigsaw puzzle. The pretty heiress, who is the victim of a cruel marriage because of her fortune, wins and keeps our sympathy.
The mystery of the woman in white who lurks on the fringes of the story with a secret she claims to have but is unwilling to divulge is the central idea round which the story develops.
The modern nature of the narrative is striking with a range of different and very disparate voices. Troubling, though, is the different social climate of the book – women, lower classes and the servants are disenfranchised and know their place. That is not the only facet of this exciting novel that disturbs the modern reader. How I wished they had the telephone or Internet in the novel. So many problems would have been obviated.
Lots of inexpensive paperback editions exist. Mine is a Vintage Classic with 628 pages. Of course, the more you pay, the bigger the print and the better the quality of the paper but, whichever you opt for, it is easy to understand why this story was chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber as the basis of the West End musical.
GenevaLunch, 9 June 2008.
Filed under: Society
Tags: Arts and Entertainment, Community, Society
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