Category: Book Critic

Facts. What are the simple facts of a story? How much background, story, context, and fact does one need when assessing a mystery?

Imagine for a minute that you are a jury or perhaps an investigator of a mystery, what facts would you want? What are important? What would influence your decision? That’s what happens in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins…we get the facts of a case presented to us from various sources and we must assess the facts and piece the story together through intricate statements/narratives by the main characters.

When I first started The Woman in White, I had my doubts. I was worried that the format would be confusing and hard to get into….slow going with lots of background ‘fluff’ like Collins’s counterpart, Charles Dickens. I was surprised how easily everything flowed and how quickly the story started. The story is told in a unique format (an epistolary novel) meaning it is a told through a series of letters and/or journal entries, and in this case testimonies…much similar to another Victorian/Gothic classic Bram Stokers Dracula. While it is clearly a classic Victorian and gothic sensationalism novel it is also widely acclaimed as one of the first detective novels of the time.

The novel jumps right into the story without a whole lot of long eloquent Victorian wordiness, beginning with the primary narrator, drawing master Walter Hartright. Hartright meets a young woman dressed all in white late at night on a deserted road back to London. From there he finds out the woman has escaped from a nearby asylum in order to pass a message along to a mysterious baronet, though Hartright helps her to escape detection he expects never to see her again but somehow he cannot forget the ghostly figure. Eventually his life and the woman in white’s become entangled forever through two ‘sisters’, Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe. Continue reading “Review: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins” →