Wilkie Collins and the Prison of Marriage

Wilkie Collins wrote during in the Victorian era, but brush the dust off his covers and it’s clear that Collins was a master of what we now call ‘domestic suspense.’ While he’s best known for classics like The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), it’s his lesser known novels such as The Law and the Lady (1875) that show Collins was way ahead of his time, especially when it came to the creation of female heroines who know their own minds and take on the role of detective. Moreover, Collins didn’t just write female characters who acted outside of Victorian norms: he rebelled against them himself.

Collins’s unorthodox lifestyle––he maintained two households without ever formalizing his relationship with either of the women involved––has often been credited for his understanding of the severity of constraints placed on women during the Victorian era, although I am not sure that is exactly the case. Collins seems to have afforded the women in his fiction more agency and freedom than he did his female companions in life. In that regard, I would argue that the writer’s life, while relevant to themes in his work, doesn’t match up to the possibilities envisioned by his writing, and at times, seems rather at odds with it.

Marriage is a claustrophobic condition in Collins’s novels––an occasion for mistrust, lies and criminal behavior. In The Woman in White, marriage becomes an opportunity for Laura Fairlie’s husband to steal her fortune; The Law and the Lady follows protagonist Valeria Woodville as she discovers that her husband has been on trial for murdering his former wife and embarks on clearing his name.

Collins himself decided he would never marry. In his biography of the author, Peter Ackroyd notes that Collins wrote in a biography of his own father that matrimony ‘was the most momentous risk in which any man can engage.’” And that sentence seems to sum up the difference between marriage in life versus fiction for Collins. In his fiction, marriage is a force intended to control women; in life, he acted as though marriage was intended to trap men.

Collins first domestic companion was Caroline Graves, who owned a shop and had a daughter from a previous marriage. While Collins lived with his mother and brother for the sake of appearances, he spent much of his time with Graves and her daughter. Ackroyd points out that the set up cannot have been easy for Graves:

“No married lady would have visited them. There will have been friends who deplored this connection, and urged him to break it. There may have been others who considered Caroline Graves an adventuress or worse. If Caroline Graves and Collins gave dinner parties, no ladies would be invited. Parents would have forbidden children to play with Caroline Graves’s daughter…”

After the wild success of The Woman in White, Collins financed Graves’s daughter’s education, and he and Caroline began to travel. Ackroyd notes almost off-handedly “It is likely to have been her first vacation abroad, but of course her reactions are not recorded.” Indeed, her reactions probably weren’t recorded, and that is part of the trouble. Unlike the heroines of his novels, Collins’s female companions remain voiceless. We don’t really know what they thought about their domestic arrangements with him because their views were not put down in writing.

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Law and The Lady, David Skilton says, “Unfortunately motives for such choices as Collins’s could not be written about at the time, and can only be guessed at now. Certainly there is little to suggest the his partners were anything other than willing and largely content participants in his unusual domestic arrangements, although we now easily recognize that the whole sexual system at the time, marital and non-marital, was heavily weighted against women’s interests.”

For me, the second half of the last sentence contradicts the first. If the whole system was heavily weighted against women’s interests, how can we be so sure that the women participants in Collins’ life were ‘largely content’? There is evidence to suggest otherwise, and even if they were, without their word for it, how do we tell? Collins was, by all reports, a strange looking but kindly and affable man; still, their reactions to a situation which in many ways didn’t favor their interests must have been more complicated than just contentment.

This doesn’t make Collins any less of a writer, nor his fictional heroines any less impressive or independent, but it goes to show that arguments along the lines of “because of X in an author’s life, we see Y in their fiction” necessarily circumspect.

Skilton notes, and I agree, that “relating artists’ lives point by point to their art… show little about the works of art concerned,” and more, I’d add, about the agenda of the person making the argument. He goes on to observe, “What we do know is that Wilkie Collins had occasion to think about the domestic and legal position of women in a way that his friend and contemporary novelist Dickens did not.” The implication is that because of his unusual domestic arrangements Collins had reason to ponder women’s domestic and legal position and that those thoughts subsequently found their way into his work. That is possible, but it might equally be the case that Collins did not take into consideration the awkward and dependent position into which he put his women partners in life, or if he did, he doesn’t seem to have allowed his reservations to alter his behavior. So how to account for his independent heroines? Well, maybe he just liked to break the mold. He did so for himself in his life and he conferred his agency on his heroines in his novels.

When his mother died, Collins could have married Graves. Instead, that very year, he took up with Martha Rudd, a woman who was believed to be his mother’s maid. She was twenty-three, he was forty-four and often seriously ill. He set up Rudd in a house that was a fifteen-minute walk away from his home with Graves. Rudd and Collins would have three children together. According to Ackroyd, Rudd was “only ever directly mentioned by Collins in his correspondence with his solicitor. To his closest acquaintance she was described as his ‘morganatic marriage’”—a marriage between unequals––“It is possible that [Collins] never introduced [Rudd] to Caroline Graves, and it is unlikely that he ever took her among his friends.”

Presumably in protest, Graves married another man. Collins was present at the ceremony. Ackroyd says that Dickens wrote to his sister-in-law: “’for anything one knows, the whole matrimonial pretense may be a lie of [Graves’s], intended to make [Collins] marry her.’” Which suggests that marriage was important to Graves––and that while it might have felt like an unacceptable “risk” for Collins, for Graves it was the preferable option. So yes, Collins led an unorthodox domestic life, and yes, the heroines in his fiction are unorthodox and bold—but the causal connection, if there is one, is not direct. One doesn’t necessarily spring from the other.

Graves’s marriage didn’t last long, and after two years, she returned to Collins. They lived together until the end of his life, while Collins also spent time with Rudd and their children. Graves’ grandchildren and Rudd’s children with Collins also spent time together, although by all accounts Rudd and Graves never met. When Collins died, Graves and her daughter attended his funeral as his ‘official’ family; Rudd and her children did not, but flowers were sent from “Mrs. Dawson and family” (which was the name under which Rudd and her children were known.) Collins divided his estate between Graves and Rudd, and Graves was buried with Collins when she died. Rudd tended their grave until she died in 1919. My guess is that the women weren’t exactly content with their situation but learned to make peace with it, presumably because they had no other choice.

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In contrast, Valeria Woodville, the heroine of The Law and The Lady, Collins’ work which features a boldly independent heroine, operates from within both the confines and protections of marriage. The novel opens with the marriage ceremony, and its first words are from the service: “…being into subjection unto their own husbands, even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord…” The story is narrated by Valeria who, as we will soon see, is hardly the type to be subject to anyone, let alone her wishy-washy husband.

The chapter is titled “The Bride’s Mistake.” Valeria accidentally signs her married name (instead of her maiden name) in the registry book, which her aunt tells her is a bad omen. Valeria loves her husband deeply, and she loves him to the end—for reasons that never become quite clear to the reader because she seems much more dynamic than he is––but she soon learns that he was once on trial for poisoning his former wife, and only roams free now because a jury decided that the charges against him were not properly proven. She decides to do one better: she will remove the stain on his name and prove to the world he is innocent. So what is the bride’s real mistake? Not her incorrect signature, which we know is trivial—what the omen portends is revealed in the following chapters: a wrong that has been has already been done, and it involves her husband. So, the bride’s mistake seems to be becoming a bride in the first place, which is strange, because if Valeria hadn’t married Eustace Woodville, none of the heroics on which she embarks, and which form the bulk of the narrative, would have reason to take place. Marriage offers Valeria the opportunity to save Eustace.

The ending is stranger still. After all matters have been resolved and (spoiler alert) Eustace is proved innocent, Valeria ends on the following note: “Don’t bear hardly, good people, on the follies and errors of my husband’s life. Abuse me as much as you please. But pray think kindly of Eustace, for my sake.”

It is a remarkable final sentence, indicating that Valeria is fully aware the reader will think Eustace weak—but it is marriage that has both put Valeria into the predicament she’s in (having to save him) and given her an opportunity grow in the safety of her position as a married woman. In fact, as she’s out and about on her investigations, Valeria’s married status serves as a shield and protects her from unwanted attentions. While I couldn’t quite escape the irony of the situation, and couldn’t quite believe that Valeria loves Eustace as much as she says she does, the novel effectively illustrates the plusses and minuses of the institution––on the one hand, it makes Valeria technically subject to her husband, on the other, it gives her freedom to operate that might be harder to come by and more open to misinterpretation as a single woman. The Law and The Lady, despite being one of Collins’s lesser known works, is suspenseful and clever. Its secondary characters, like the cripple Misserimus Dexter, a “fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one,” and its determined heroine feel surprisingly modern. Despite Collins’ aversion to marriage in his own life, and notwithstanding the problems his aversion might cause for his female companions, Collins’ novels draw from, but ultimately soar above his own idiosyncrasies and fears. He gives Valeria her own voice and the agency to control the narrative, which is what makes The Law and The Lady so readable and fresh almost a century and a half since it was first published.