If asked to trace crime and suspense novels to a common ancestor, you can’t do much better than Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Published to instant success in serial form over 150 years ago, it’s considered one of the earliest examples of the mystery genre and the first ‘sensation’ novel—a novel that specializes in jangling the nerves and stimulating the senses, or as the satirical magazine Punch put it, in “Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life.” As such, Woman in White is also arguably the precursor to what we now call the ‘thriller.’ We take the latter term so much for granted, and parse it in so many different ways—spy thriller, domestic thriller, psychological thriller, literary thriller—that we sometimes forget that the key premise of this type of writing is embedded its name. A thriller promises its readers suspenseful thrills, just as The Woman in White did when it first hit the stands in 1859, and which it continues to do to this day—despite the fact that our social mores have changed considerably since the Victorian era.
In the novel’s famed opening scene, art teacher Walter Hartright is walking back to London on a desolate street around midnight “when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.”
He turns to see “the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to toe in white garments…”
“’Is that the road to London?’” she asks.
The encounter is both unexpected and cinematic. The dark, deserted road, coupled with the late hour contrasts vividly with the light touch of the extraordinarily dressed woman and her mundane question. It’s a moment that sets the stage for all that follows, and we could imagine it in a Tim Burton film or film noir. Walter can’t figure out the stranger: he tells us that her manner was “not exactly that of a lady, and at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life…What sort of a woman she was, and how she came to be out alone on the high-road, an hour after midnight, I altogether failed to guess.” When he finally pieces together her motives, and discovers what she knows and doesn’t know, the 600-plus-page novel has almost reached its conclusion.
Walter quickly learns that the woman dressed in white is Anne Catherick, an escapee from a lunatic asylum, and that she bears a striking resemblance to the innocent heiress, Laura Fairlie, with whom he falls in love. But Laura is engaged to the sinister aristocrat Sir Percival Glyde, and since there’s nothing overtly wrong with him—in fact, Sir Percival appears handsome and considerate—she goes ahead with the marriage, despite her feelings for Walter and Anne’s desperate yet cryptic warning against the match. Although Anne Catherick is not the main female character in The Woman in White, (Laura Fairlie and her ‘mannish’ half-sister Marian take on that mantle) she is its guiding light. Anne’s white garments and fleeting appearances give her a spectral aspect, her actions set the plot into motion, and her touch of mental illness make her words and warnings suspect—both to the other characters and to the reader whom she continues to haunt long after the mystery is done.
Contemporary psychological thrillers that mine the perils of marriage…share more with their predecessor than just the drive to thrill and shock.Contemporary psychological thrillers that mine the perils of marriage, such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, share more with their predecessor than just the drive to thrill and shock. The Woman in White and its contemporary counterparts are anchored by a common set of preoccupations. The presence of girl/woman in the titles is a clue to the questions that all these novels revolve around: Who is the woman at the center of the narrative? Can we believe her? And what is she capable of? These apply as much to Anne Catherick as they do to Rachel from The Girl on the Train or Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne.
While Flynn and Hawkins, writing a century and a half later, operate under a different set of norms—their female leads can be psychopaths or alcoholics—the central impulse that keeps the reader turning their pages is, I believe, the same as that of Woman in White. Although Walter stoutly maintains that even the “grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued [Anne’s] motives in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place,” the novel is fascinated by women’s sexuality, women’s mental stability (or lack thereof), and the perception of women’s physical vulnerability. These themes have provided rich narrative fodder all the way from Collins’s time through noir, neo-noir and to the present. If handled with originality and flair, they not only deliver the fuel to keep the narrative engine going but can turn suspenseful domestic dramas into blockbusters.
Like many modern thrillers, Woman in White is cleverly plotted with multiple twists and reversals of expectation. From the British Library:
The intricacies of the plot…defy easy summary, each convolution and partial revelation driving the reader on to the next scene, and the next, disclosing the secret like a series of Russian dolls.
It also pioneered the use of multiple narrators and their limited and sometimes conflicting points of view to generate suspense. Collins explained his method in the preface to the 1860 edition: “An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters…They are all placed in different positions along the chain of events; and they all take the chain up in turn, and carry it on to the end.” For Collins this technique isn’t “a mere novelty of form.” It helps the story move forward, he says, and allows the characters to express themselves more fully. Like Flynn and Hawkins, Collins even makes use of an unreliable narrator at one point, but Count Fosco’s unreliability isn’t required to trick the reader into misunderstanding what has happened as much as it is a window into his monstrous nature.
What gives The Woman in White its distinctly Victorian feel is the extraordinary range of secondary characters that Collins employs. These might be minor figures like Laura’s governess Mrs. Vesey: “Some of us rush through life; and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.” Or Laura’s uncle and guardian, Frederick Fairlie, “a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man,” who would prefer that his niece sign a reckless prenuptial agreement rather than deal with the bother of contesting it.
There’s Marian Halcombe, Laura’s devoted half-sister, a woman of uncommon intelligence and resourcefulness. When Walter first sees her, it’s from a distance and he’s struck by her beautiful figure and elegant manner. As she moves closer, he realizes “(with a sense of surprise which words fail [him] to express), The lady is ugly!” She’s ugly because she’s mannish, with dark skin, a low forehead and thick down on her upper lip that’s “almost a moustache.” No discussion of The Woman in White would be complete without a description of Count Fosco, one of English literature’s most memorable villains. The obese and cunning Count moves soundlessly through the rooms of Blackwater Park, Sir Percy’s decrepit country estate. He snacks on bonbons, fondles his pet canaries and white mice, and allows them to run all over his enormous body. The Count’s power over those in his orbit is evidenced by the behavior of his once irascible wife. Marian observes that, “On the few occasions when [the Countess’s] cold blue eyes are off her work, they are generally turned on her husband, with the look of mute submissive inquiry which we are all familiar with in the eyes of a faithful dog…”
She goes on: “He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes as his wife does—I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers.”
Having created such a fearsome villain, Collins realized that he needed a minor one, a “weak shabby villain, the tool of Fosco,” by way of contrast. Sir Percival and the Count play off each other: just when the reader thinks that Laura’s husband might not be too awful, the Count steps in, and then we know that the heiress isn’t going to come through this unscathed.
The Woman in White has never been out of print since it first appeared in Charles Dicken’s journal, All the Year Round. It attracted so much interest and enthusiasm upon its release that it spawned theatrical adaptions, and shopkeepers sold bonnets, capes and sheet-music based on the novel. Collins even received “a number of letters from single gentlemen, stating their position and means, and their wish to marry the original of Marian Halcombe at once.” His techniques for building psychological suspense set the standard for his day, and despite the fact that we’re now accustomed to levels of violence and perverted criminality in fiction that he probably never imagined, The Woman in White continues to draw readers into its world, and provides harrowing suspense on par with contemporary best-sellers.
