Victorian Women: 4. The Woman in White
We study six great books by and about women in our Victorian Women course, live online, September to November 2023.
Lecturer Clare Walker-Gore reflects upon each of the books in a series of blog posts. Here she looks at Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
From The Woman in White
I started up from the ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road chilled me again.
There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight; in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt which had troubled my mind for hours and hours past flashed into conviction in an instant. That ‘something wanting’ was my own recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House.
‘You see it!’ said Miss Halcombe. She dropped the useless letter, and her eyes flashed as they met mine. ‘You see it now, as my mother saw it eleven years since!’
‘I see it – more unwillingly than I can say. To associate that forlorn, friendless, lost woman, even by an accidental likeness only, with Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future of the bright creature who stands looking at us now. Let me lose the impression again as soon as possible. Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight – pray call her in!’
‘Mr. Hartright, you surprise me. Whatever women may be, I thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition.’
‘Pray call her in!’
Walter Hartright’s sudden apprehension of the likeness between the heiress Laura Fairlie and the ‘woman in white’ he met on Hampstead Heath is characteristically sensational. The ‘thrill’ Walter feels, his sense of being ‘started’ and ‘chilled’, mirrors the reader’s own experience of this page-turning novel, its short serial parts punctuated by twists, turns, and physically registered shocks.
Its hybrid genre, which combines the traditions of the gothic novel with those of domestic realism, is neatly encapsulated by Marian’s commonsensical objection to Walter’s superstitious horror at the likeness between his wealthy, cossetted beloved Laura, and the woman soon revealed to be Anne Catherick, fugitive from a private asylum.
Are the characters operating in a strictly prosaic world in which a man should be ‘above superstition’, or are the characters’ dreams to be read as prophetic? Might chance likenesses represent more profound connections? In fact, Collins’s plotting allows the likeness between Laura and Anne to work on both realist and gothic levels, whilst also informing the novel’s complex feminist politics.
As we follow Walter and Marian in untangling the web of lies woven by the novel’s wonderfully compelling villains, we are confronted with radical questions about the institution of marriage, the laws of inheritance, and the legal status of women, all of which go to the heart of the Woman Question in the 1860s.
The Victorian Women course first ran in autumn 2022 and is repeated Sept.-Nov. 2023.
Dr Clare Walker Gore has taught at the Open University and the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
