Books worth reading - The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

I read Wilkie Collins “The Woman in White” on the recommendation of my dear friend Mariam Karim.

Before getting to the book I would first like to give a brief description on the writer. Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter. He had worked in tea business and entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn. The legal knowledge he acquired was used in his writings.
He was a friend of Charles Dickens, acting with him, contributing to ‘Household Words’ and traveling with him on the Continent. Dickens produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse (1855) and The Frozen Deep (1857). Dickens also edited “The Woman in White”.
Besides “The Woman in White” (1860) Wilkie Collins also wrote “The Moonstone” (1868), which T. S. Eliot called 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'. His novels ‘The New Magdalen’ (1873) and ‘The Law and The Lady’ (1875) were considered rather sensational novels for its time.
Collins also braved the moral censure of the Victorian age by keeping two women (and their households) while marrying neither.
He died in 1889.

“The Woman in White”
First of all I would like to say that once I started reading the novel, I wanted to complete it. A sure shot sign of the book being to my liking.

The book is divided into chapters and sub-chapters and reads like a television serial. Some readers have also likened it to a Soap Opera. Later I found out that the book was first published in a serialized form.

The advantages of the form being that at every break there was something to look forward to. The disadvantage being that every break was built up in an elaborate fashion which did not suit the novel format. The passages just before the break became long drawn and tempted you to skip them and exactly when you begin to think that you are near some discovery, the book takes you back into the spider web.

The novel is a Victorian Age tale of an ordinary drawing master and an heiress in love and their adventures, both forced and self imposed, mixed up with murder, conspiracy, lunacy, illness, affairs and a ‘look alike’ thrown in. The good win at the end, and the bad, although smarter all the while, get screwed by destiny in the end. Melodramatic it is.

Sample this for intrigue:

A man put his head from the window and asked: "Have you seen a woman pass this way-a woman in white? She has escaped from my asylum."

These lines make you look ahead and several times in the novel we have starts like this which keeps our interest.

We have characters like Laura Glyde nee Fairlie and Walter Hartright (lovers who separate at the start to reunite at the end) Marian Halcombe (the intelligent sister of Laura), Pesca (the bubbly Italian friend of Walter), who love selflessly and then we have characters like Sir Percival Glyde (The impostor Baronet and husband of Laura), Count Fosco (An Italian in exile and friend of Sir Percival) whose devotion to another is based on logical calculations. We have fringe players enacting the roles of lawyers, doctors, asylum keepers, nurses, housekeepers, etc, who help in the story of Anne Catherick (Laura Glyde’s look- alike and ‘The Woman in White’), reaching its conclusion.

In short it is story of the desperadoes Sir PG and Count F, Short of money, getting the better of LG and MH, pocketing LG’s inheritance and her identity, till WH comes back into the story to set things right. Sir PG is done in by his obstinacy and meets his death at the place of his original crime, while Pesca unwittingly scares Count F to his end.

Some of the quotes that are worth mentioning are:

But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse.
Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.
"I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong."
Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.
The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

All in all a book you will read from cover to cover.