We've already covered 'No Name' and 'Armadale' here at the Quirky Muffin, both first timer reads, and now it's time for the re-reads of 'The Woman In White' and eventually 'The Moonstone'. This can't be a fair comparison, due to Collins' novels suffering a little in subsequent experiences, but we can't be perfect. That lack of sustainability is a definite mark against his status as a classical giant, but the 'Big Four' still have an epic quality that offsets their disadvantages. A 'sensation novel' is bound to lose something after the first reading by its very definition, after all!
'The Woman In White' was the first of Collins' 'Big Four' novels, and helped kick off the sensation novel as a phenomenon. It's a great and epic conspiracy or mystery, novelly told via the written accounts of many of the story's characters, and is at times spooky and suspenseful. It's also my least favourite of the three I've read so far! Is it really due to it being a re-read instead of a first time? Was it just the general mood of the time? It's hard to say. It may be that Wilkie fatigue has set in, and that the constant deprecation of women while simultaneously pioneering complex female protagonists has had a confusing and tiring effect.
'The Woman In White' is probably far better than I'm willing to admit. It's better than 'Armadale', to contradict my earlier statement, thanks to the absence of many of the structural flaws of that later work, but there's far too much exposition in 'The Woman In White'. You could argue that it's all exposition due to it being a compilation of the written narratives of the characters in the story, but there is an awful lot of blatant explanation where a description would have been better...
What was it like to read this for the first time? I honestly can't remember. The first Wilkie Collins novel to fall into my hands was 'The Moonstone', as a result of noticing a BBC mini-series adaptation, and which I liked very much. I don't remember much about the first reading of 'The Woman In White' at all, but the story is ingenious, and the 'eccentric of the week' almost endearing in the form of the devious and corpulent Count Fosco. The Count is really the star of the piece, as was Captain Wragge in 'No Name'. Collins could really write an eccentric like no other, except perhaps Dickens. Not being a Dickensian, no definitive statement can be made at this time.
For form's sake, what it 'The Woman In White' about? Mutter mutter. It's the story of an intrigue and conspiracy via which a dissolute baronet marries a fair but heartbroken heiress and proceeds to try and rob her of her fortune to benefit himself and the equally penniless foreign peer Fosco. However, due to unexpected steel in his wife and her half-sister, he and the Count have to fake her death and substitute her body with that of a mentally imbalanced commoner who happens to be her sickly lookalike. Finally, all is saved by the wife's long-lost sweetheart, who tracks down the conspirators and manages to save the day... No, 'No Name' is definitely a better story.
'The Woman In White' is an awesome groundbreaker for what was to come, and it's probably not the best of Collins. Every fibre of my being says that will be the last of the Big Four to be written about here. We have only 'The Moonstone' to come...
O.
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