Collins' sensational masterpiece was deeper than it looked. The sinister plot in the Woman in White is possible because of the property laws that constrained a married woman in 19th century England - unless her inheritance was tied up in trust, a woman's property became her husband's upon marriage. Ten years after Collins' fictional sensation, John Stuart Mill, famous for writing On Liberty, would blisteringly observe in The Subjection of Women that the legal constraints binding women in marriage rendered them essentially domestic slaves.
Collins never again combined sensationalism with social critique with such success. The Moonstone uses the same narrative technique of collected testimonies, but is more of a detective novel. Collins wrote other social problem novels, but the social commentary started to drown out character and plot development. As one wit quipped:
"What brought Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered, Wilkie, have a mission."
I’d read some about that after I finished the book, as I was thinking about the review. He handled the balance between the social context and the story well enough to avoid the sermonizing trap—sounds like he struggled with that later on.
Yes, his third best known novel No Name, has all of the twists and turns of WiW and is critiquing how those born illegitimately are treated, but I found the main character not quite believable - too many dramatic shifts in behaviour.
Aww, I LOVED No Name. I admit Magdalen is a bit, uhh, dramatic, but then, that's kind of her calling card. And Captain Wragge is like no one else I've encountered in literature. Anyway, Joel, you've convinced me. Woman in White is now on my list. Big respect for Wilkie Collins.
No Name held my attention until the end, but it was a book that was easy to walk away from after finishing. WiW and especially The Moonstone have more staying power. It is hard to quantify what makes a book great rather than good, but for me part of greatness lies in how it enriches one's life after it is read.
As you can see from what I've written on this book in my own Substack, I'm not convinced that Collins had any great feminist motives in writing WiW. I think he just took the legal disability of women as an excellent hook for a great story. Which is just to say that I think that the social criticism in this novel is mostly accidental - and far more visible to the reader who does not take coverture as a background fact.
It never occured to me to call Wilkie Collins a feminist. His personal life shows he was exploitive toward women and his depiction of Walter's first impression of Marian's figure in WiW always struck me as very objectifying. But Collins was a critic of the institution of marriage - probably for his own selfish reasons, since he kept, in the Victorian euphemism, two separate establishments - and used his legal training to ensure that his plots were accurate.
John Stuart Mill was not entirely disinterested in his critique of the treatment of married women either - he was emotionally involved with a married woman, women's rights advocate Harriet Taylor, who would not leave her husband; they waited until her husband died to marry. But, notwithstanding their complicated motivations, the writing of Wilkie Collins and Stuart Mill did help crack the foundation of the archaic institution of coverture - the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gave married women the right to control what was theirs.
Picked up woman in white. Already read almost half of your years list. Will revisit some maybe since it’s been a long time ago I read them. Been reading nonstop and trying to keep my head above water with life in general. 🤓
Joel, what a fabulous deep dive into ' masterpiece (although the Moonstone is just as fantastic). Wonderful to discover all the details surrounding the publication. Longing to pick this one back up now. (Also, how in the world are you going to read War and Peace in a month and still get anything else done?)
Thank you. And The Moonstone is definitely on my TBR now. Re War and Peace: Lord, have mercy. I think I’ll start it earlier to give myself time. Moby Dick isn’t too long, so I can handle that in a couple of weeks and push into W&P before the month starts. At least, that’s probably what I’ll do.
The Moonstone starts out brilliantly but then sputters. Gabriel the butler is a magnificent creation - he thinks that all of life's problems can be solved by consulting Robinson Crusoe - but the second narrator is incredibly irritating, and the plot descends into hypnotism and other things that are less than plausible.
The others also have issues, although they're all entertaining reads. But I think WiW was his very best.
Fantastic of course. And hard not to talk about the spoilers, but the end is all that matters. What a coverup! What a way to line one's own pockets. What a way to write a novel starting from the end and working backwards to be most convincing!
I hope I didn’t give too much away; I thought I could glance off the spoilers without giving them all away. It’s such a remarkably well composed novel.
The Woman in White is one of my favorite Victorian novels! I'm not usually a fan of novels with mulitple narrators, but he executed it so well that my gripes about the form don't matter.
One of the things I loved about the book is that it's clear that Walter's true soul mate is Marian, but Collins trusts the reader to figure it out on their own.
Love this book...gives me the shivers just thinking about it...the only other book to have the same effect for me was World Enough & Time by Robert Penn Warren.....
I'm delighted with your essay on WIW and agree wholeheartedly with your conclusions. The novel capture me as well and for over a year I read everything I could by Collins including several excellent biographies. Wonderful reading experience. I'll pass this review on to my friends!
I read The Woman in White last year, along with many other big books including The Karamazov Brothers. Daniel Deronda is interesting. It's not nearly as good as MIddlemarch, of course, but what could be? Eliot, having the success of Middlemarch behind her, was encouraged by some members of the British elites of the time, which were in her circle of friends and acquaintances to write it. Knowing that, we can see it as propaganda for Zionism which has been around for a lot longer than most people believe and always encouraged by these same British elites all along the way. That knowledge adds another level of interest to the book.
I've also got The Moonstone and East of Eden by my bedside right now waiting for me to finish The Odyssey. Going to be another year of reading big books, a project I began three years ago. Thanks for encouraging people to read good literature.
I’m really disappointed that Wilkie Collins isn’t female. For some reason, I had it in my head that Wilkie was a “she”. I plan to read The Woman in White this year, and now I’ll have to make myself think in a male voice instead of female. I just read The Haunted Hotel, and I had the female writer in mind the whole time. This is like when you’re reading a character, and you have an image of them in your head, and then the author tells you they have blonde hair when CLEARLY they have black hair in your head. It’s disorienting.
Collins' sensational masterpiece was deeper than it looked. The sinister plot in the Woman in White is possible because of the property laws that constrained a married woman in 19th century England - unless her inheritance was tied up in trust, a woman's property became her husband's upon marriage. Ten years after Collins' fictional sensation, John Stuart Mill, famous for writing On Liberty, would blisteringly observe in The Subjection of Women that the legal constraints binding women in marriage rendered them essentially domestic slaves.
Collins never again combined sensationalism with social critique with such success. The Moonstone uses the same narrative technique of collected testimonies, but is more of a detective novel. Collins wrote other social problem novels, but the social commentary started to drown out character and plot development. As one wit quipped:
"What brought Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered, Wilkie, have a mission."
I’d read some about that after I finished the book, as I was thinking about the review. He handled the balance between the social context and the story well enough to avoid the sermonizing trap—sounds like he struggled with that later on.
Yes, his third best known novel No Name, has all of the twists and turns of WiW and is critiquing how those born illegitimately are treated, but I found the main character not quite believable - too many dramatic shifts in behaviour.
Aww, I LOVED No Name. I admit Magdalen is a bit, uhh, dramatic, but then, that's kind of her calling card. And Captain Wragge is like no one else I've encountered in literature. Anyway, Joel, you've convinced me. Woman in White is now on my list. Big respect for Wilkie Collins.
No Name held my attention until the end, but it was a book that was easy to walk away from after finishing. WiW and especially The Moonstone have more staying power. It is hard to quantify what makes a book great rather than good, but for me part of greatness lies in how it enriches one's life after it is read.
Fair.
As you can see from what I've written on this book in my own Substack, I'm not convinced that Collins had any great feminist motives in writing WiW. I think he just took the legal disability of women as an excellent hook for a great story. Which is just to say that I think that the social criticism in this novel is mostly accidental - and far more visible to the reader who does not take coverture as a background fact.
It never occured to me to call Wilkie Collins a feminist. His personal life shows he was exploitive toward women and his depiction of Walter's first impression of Marian's figure in WiW always struck me as very objectifying. But Collins was a critic of the institution of marriage - probably for his own selfish reasons, since he kept, in the Victorian euphemism, two separate establishments - and used his legal training to ensure that his plots were accurate.
John Stuart Mill was not entirely disinterested in his critique of the treatment of married women either - he was emotionally involved with a married woman, women's rights advocate Harriet Taylor, who would not leave her husband; they waited until her husband died to marry. But, notwithstanding their complicated motivations, the writing of Wilkie Collins and Stuart Mill did help crack the foundation of the archaic institution of coverture - the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gave married women the right to control what was theirs.
Picked up woman in white. Already read almost half of your years list. Will revisit some maybe since it’s been a long time ago I read them. Been reading nonstop and trying to keep my head above water with life in general. 🤓
Joel, what a fabulous deep dive into ' masterpiece (although the Moonstone is just as fantastic). Wonderful to discover all the details surrounding the publication. Longing to pick this one back up now. (Also, how in the world are you going to read War and Peace in a month and still get anything else done?)
Thank you. And The Moonstone is definitely on my TBR now. Re War and Peace: Lord, have mercy. I think I’ll start it earlier to give myself time. Moby Dick isn’t too long, so I can handle that in a couple of weeks and push into W&P before the month starts. At least, that’s probably what I’ll do.
The Moonstone starts out brilliantly but then sputters. Gabriel the butler is a magnificent creation - he thinks that all of life's problems can be solved by consulting Robinson Crusoe - but the second narrator is incredibly irritating, and the plot descends into hypnotism and other things that are less than plausible.
The others also have issues, although they're all entertaining reads. But I think WiW was his very best.
In haven’t read this, even though I do like to read all the classics. I shall have to check it out!
It’s really tremendous!
Fantastic of course. And hard not to talk about the spoilers, but the end is all that matters. What a coverup! What a way to line one's own pockets. What a way to write a novel starting from the end and working backwards to be most convincing!
I hope I didn’t give too much away; I thought I could glance off the spoilers without giving them all away. It’s such a remarkably well composed novel.
The Woman in White is one of my favorite Victorian novels! I'm not usually a fan of novels with mulitple narrators, but he executed it so well that my gripes about the form don't matter.
One of the things I loved about the book is that it's clear that Walter's true soul mate is Marian, but Collins trusts the reader to figure it out on their own.
I wondered about that as well. She’s the first of the two he sees, and she’s clearly his match.
Excellent!
I never saw the Alphonse de Neuville illustrations before - they're magnificent!
Those who want more on this excellent novel could check out my piece on it, which focuses more on the narrative strategies than the sensation fiction aspects: https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/narration-and-voicelessness-in-the
Thanks for sharing!
Love this book...gives me the shivers just thinking about it...the only other book to have the same effect for me was World Enough & Time by Robert Penn Warren.....
I hope your excellent review sends more readers to this fabulous book. It is a page turner!
I'm delighted with your essay on WIW and agree wholeheartedly with your conclusions. The novel capture me as well and for over a year I read everything I could by Collins including several excellent biographies. Wonderful reading experience. I'll pass this review on to my friends!
I read The Woman in White last year, along with many other big books including The Karamazov Brothers. Daniel Deronda is interesting. It's not nearly as good as MIddlemarch, of course, but what could be? Eliot, having the success of Middlemarch behind her, was encouraged by some members of the British elites of the time, which were in her circle of friends and acquaintances to write it. Knowing that, we can see it as propaganda for Zionism which has been around for a lot longer than most people believe and always encouraged by these same British elites all along the way. That knowledge adds another level of interest to the book.
I've also got The Moonstone and East of Eden by my bedside right now waiting for me to finish The Odyssey. Going to be another year of reading big books, a project I began three years ago. Thanks for encouraging people to read good literature.
I’m really disappointed that Wilkie Collins isn’t female. For some reason, I had it in my head that Wilkie was a “she”. I plan to read The Woman in White this year, and now I’ll have to make myself think in a male voice instead of female. I just read The Haunted Hotel, and I had the female writer in mind the whole time. This is like when you’re reading a character, and you have an image of them in your head, and then the author tells you they have blonde hair when CLEARLY they have black hair in your head. It’s disorienting.
An exceptional analysis of a complex book.
I liked the 1948 movie - I may have to read the book now.