The Woman in White

I've never liked the term "butterface." I don't object to the objectification; I just don't like the sound of it. Nonetheless, it unavoidably popped into my head at my introduction from behind to Miss Halcombe, as Collins allows Hartright to ogle "the rare beauty of her form...[and] her waist, perfection to the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place...visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays*," before she turns and he's horrified by the revelation that "The lady is ugly!" (I.6)

Since I like pretentious literary allusions as much as I dislike the word "butterface," I propose to exchange that unpleasant word for the new term, "Halcombe." It's even gender-neutral: "That guy you went home with last night? Looks like he hits the show more gym plenty...but man, what a Halcombe." Much better, right? I've already put it on urbandictionary.com; go give it a thumbs up.

Collins, a polyamorous laudanum addict, invented a genre called the sensation novel with Woman in White. He took Gothic stories away from their ghost-filled castles and directly into what he called "the secret theatre of home": "Collins and his fellow sensationalists [Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Charles Reade and Rhoda Broughton] re-mapped the 'knowable communities' within which writers such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant plotted their fictions as territories that were unknowable, or at least dangerous to know" (Penguin Read Red intro). Unsurprisingly, this has been a big hit with generations of people who dislike their spouses.

And it's a terrific book. The titular woman shows up almost immediately to hook you in; after a brief slow-down to set the stage, around a third of the way in the tension ratchets up and never lets go again. It's incredibly gripping, and there are no plot holes. It features several brilliant characters: the aforementioned Halcombe, who makes the book basically feminist; the hypochondriac Fairlie; and, of course, the illimitable Fosco, one of the most memorable creations ever.

It's set up as an unusual epistolary: testimony from a number of sources, as if for a legal proceeding. The switching of narrators allows Collins to play a bunch of daring tricks: at one point a character suddenly intrudes in another's diary, confessing that he stole and read it, and commenting on her version of events.

And, of course, it lets Collins experiment extensively with the idea of the unreliable narrator. At least three passages are overtly untrustworthy (Fairlie, Mrs. Catherick and Fosco are also the most entertaining narrators); and since Collins obviously meant for us to understand that, might it not follow that the rest of the narrators are equally untrustworthy? Major spoilers: Hartright takes forever in his attempt to save Percival's life. Is it possible that he was stalling? Was it really impossible for him to go to the police? Does he bear some responsibility for Fosco's murder? In each of these cases, Collins gives him an excuse: no townspeople thought of better ways to save Percival; Mr. Kyrle insists that he has "not a shadow of a case"; the scarred man picks up on Fosco's identity as Hartright does. I'm not convinced that we're supposed to believe Hartright is lying to us, but I do think we're supposed to think about it.

*Collins was wonderfully against corsets, and unapologetically an ass man: "I too think the back view of a finely formed woman the loveliest view." (Letters of Wilkie Collins, Vol. II, p. 534; ganked from an endnote in my edition)

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Edition review: the Penguin Read Red edition is fantastic. Great intro and great endnotes. The Kindle version I bought did a superb job of linking to the endnotes (something often neglected in Kindle editions), and it's only $4.75. show less

Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White is 19th century sensationalist fiction at its finest. Don’t be deceived by its 700 pages – this was by far the most approachable book I’ve read for its size, especially for a mystery read.

We enter the story through the words of Walter Hartright, a young painter and art teacher who takes up a job opportunity to teach painting to two half-sisters at the Limmeridge House mansion. Before this however, he comes across a strange woman dressed in all white on the streets of London who, he learns, has escaped from an asylum. The plot begins to unravel as Walter learns of a domestic conspiracy that threatens the lives of the two half-sisters, Laura Glyde and Marian Halcombe – the unsettling fact is show more that the two men responsible are Laura’s future husband and her own uncle. This book is in fact, is Collins attempt to highlight the impartiality of the British legal system in relation to married women (as is his later work Man and Wife) during his time. A book that treats such ideas as an impetus for literature are always welcomed!

There is a lot that Wilkie Collins should be praised for, the quick pacing being something that I especially admired him for in such a long read. The novel, as it confesses at the start, is told through the perspectives of multiple characters much like a court case is presented through various witnesses. The reader, then, is encouraged to untangle the web of mystery that surrounds The Woman in White, while appreciating the multiple plot-twists that comes his or her way.

Collins’ work also explores the idea of the unconscious with profundity, as the element of sleep (both naturally and artificially induced) is critical to the plot. And for those of us who could spend hours writing papers on the notion of identity, this book provides more than enough places concepts to get you thinking.

I do not think that this is an exemplary novel of the sensationalist genre, much less of 19th century urban Gothic, but for readers of the genre it’s quite an entertaining read. This book receives bonus points for having a strong female central figure (Marian Halcombe) as well. Yay!

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What an immense joy to read. In a bid to read a bit more thoughtfully (contrary to belief, reading 100+ a year does not make one happy), I started on this 150 year suspense novel I had wasting on my shelf. I decided to read it in the original serial context as well, tracking each of the forty instalments alongside their original dates of publication. It's even inspired me begin a Victorian Serial Bookclub with my lovely partner as well--you can tell I loved this thing!

Taking a little over a week to read, The Woman in White was one of the most riveting reads I'd had since Rebecca. Following an intricate web of players and the central mystery of the "woman in white", the novel is a perfect mix of suspense, drama, characterization and show more social critique. Despite the novel's age, it reads easily, and Collins' is simply a master at creating unbearable tension. One of the central issues I saw play out in the pages was the reality of the lack of rights of women. Anyone who has lived their life as a woman can feel alongside Laura and Miriam's slow and horrific realization that they are trapped: physically, emotionally, and even legally. That psychological element was stunning; I can't think of another Victorian novel I've read that does that. I NEED to find more.

Anyways, I can't wait to get my hands on more of Wilkie Collins' work. I'm honestly blown away. I cannot recommend this more!!! show less

I had intended to re-read A Woman in White for a long time, so the #Wilkieinwinter reading event going on at the moment gave me the perfect excuse –if one were really needed to cosy up with this brilliant classic. The Woman in White has been called the first sensation novel – it is surely the best example of the type. This has been a fairly slow reading week for me – and so possibly not the best week to begin reading a novel of over 600 pages – however it has been such a joy to come back to at the end of each day – and I found myself thinking about it occasionally during the day at work. This is a novel that grips the reader right from the start, Collins was a consummate storyteller, and he knew well how to reel in his readers show more and hold their attention. I first read The Woman in White over twenty years ago – so it’s maybe not that surprising that I had forgotten an awful lot of the plot. As time goes on I find I have forgotten more and more of the books I read years ago - although I tend to remember quite well whether I liked them or not.
“There in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.”
Walter Hartright a young drawing master spends his last evening before heading off to a new position in Cumberland with his mother and sister at his mother’s cottage on the outskirts of London. As the evening draws to a close – Walter decides to walk back to the city through the dark streets. As he does so seemingly out of nowhere comes a distressed young woman, dressed entirely in white and asking for help. Walter accompanies the woman on her way – helping her to find the shelter and security she craves, for she is very afraid – of someone or something. As they walk together the young woman speaks of a time when she was happy as a child in a place called Limmeridge in Cumberland – the very place that Walter is due to go the following day as a drawing master to two young ladies. Putting the young woman in a cab, Walter overhears a conversation between two men, who are obviously searching for the young woman he has just helped – their conversation reveals that she has escaped from a private asylum.
Walter heads off for Limmeridge House, with the woman in white still very much in his thoughts, the coincidence of her having spent time in the vicinity of Limmeridge impressing itself upon his mind. The young women Walter has been employed to instruct are half-sisters Laura Fairlie and Marion Halcombe. Laura is a delicate beauty, an heiress, her elder sister Marion is neither of those things, but she is a wonderful heroine, strong, intelligent, resourceful and utterly devoted to her sister. Walter tells Marion about the woman in white, her mention of Limmeridge, her terrible fear and her probable escape from an asylum. For a time, the three are blissfully happy, in Marion, Walter finds a true friend, and the two try to unravel the mystery that surrounds the unhappy young woman Walter met on the road to London, and with Laura he falls helplessly in love. Laura however is an heiress her future already secured by her father before he died, and Walter is a penniless drawing master. Their chance of finding happiness together was already slight.
The fortunes of Laura Fairlie, Marion Halcombe and Walter Hartright and the woman in white are destined to become inextricably linked. Driving everything that happens to them are two of the best villains in literature; Sir Percy Glyde and Count Fosco. Fosco is charming eccentric a simply brilliantly crafted character – a man who understands how to read people, and how to get them to do what he wants. These two men are friends, and it is they who conceive the plot that is at the heart of this novel – of which I am not going to say anything more – just in case there is someone out there who has not read it.
Secrets, confused identities, intercepted letters, poison, madness; The Woman in white has it all and more.
The story of ‘The Woman in White’, is gloriously complex and fast moving, and quite a quick read by virtue of the fact that it is so hard to put down. Several nights I didn’t put the light out till after midnight –and I have to be up just after 6.00. Collins uses the multi narrator device that he used in The Moonstone – to tell this story – although our hero Walter Hartright is the main narrator. By switching narrators in this way Collins is able to move the narrative forward – revealing only just enough to the reader to keep them in suspense. He even manages to bring some needed light relief in the character of Frederick Fairlie – whose selfish hypochondriacally inspired indulgences become important to the plot – while remaining amusingly ridiculous.
“Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.”
The narrative of Marion Halcombe – a truly wonderful heroine, was probably my favourite, as it is so deeply felt. I love the fact that a writer of Wilkie Collins’ time could write a female character who was so strong intelligent and brave, it is a shame she wasn’t allowed to be attractive or have a suitor – the beautiful Laura of course is protected and fragile. It is all very Victorian of course, and I can’t help but love it. show less

A novel in three parts. The first part reads especially dull, and a third of the way in it still doesn't appear as though anything of consequence is happening. This is because Collins is masterfully telling his reader a story while concealing it from his narrators, and without making them look like idiots for not seeing it. If you're not watching the clues and merely taking what the narrators say at face value, you could be hoodwinked too. So far, so good. The second part brings a strong element of suspense into play; there's a clear sense that something is happening, or could happen, or is about to happen, but there's no telling exactly what until it's sprung. A bit frustrating. The third part is devoted to seeing whether the trap can show more be unsprung, or is it already too late?

A hundred and fifty years ago, this literary slight-of-hand wasn't considered too much to ask of the general reading population. Now there's the added advantage of being able to trust in this novel's well-regarded reputation and receiving what's in store. You'll have to deal with an author who wants to play games with you, exacerbated by the extraordinarily high degree of telling rather than showing, so that what we are not told affects our understanding all the more. Collins only occasionally tips his hand, as when Marian carefully destroys dangerous letters but only after recording their contents in her diary, which she does not destroy. This nonsense is only done for the purpose of sharing the letters with the reader. Collins also employs the weak women motif for plot convenience, having them slip into a faint or fugue, suffer from amnesia, etc. for the least cause and whenever it suits his needs. Or is even that more suspicious than it appears?

This novel's cloak-and-dagger narration was regarded as a creative and effective means of generating suspense. It made Collins' name famous and spawned a host of imitators, with examples continuing to this day. Either you appreciate all of the tricks Collins employs, or you resent it at least a little. I like a surprise as much as the next person, but if I were manipulated to this degree in any modern work I'd find it frustrating. Fortunately I approach the classics with more patience and earned this one's rewards. show less

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I can review this only in relation to its precursor, The Rainbow (review here).

My Journey

I went straight from the flames of floral, rural passion in The Rainbow, to this often brittle discussion of the abstract, set in a more mechanical age, where animals - metaphorical and literal - are key, and death’s shadow hovers hungrily. It's beautiful, entrancing, but also opaque and frustrating.

I travelled with Ursula from her teenage years in the balmy countryside, where people act on their desires, to her earnest twenties: first in a grimy northern mining town, then in the frigid, glistening ice of the Tyrollean Alps. It’s not such a linear narrative as The Rainbow; more a series of episodes (chapter lengths vary hugely - between 3 and show more 50 pages).

It seems to ask:
• Must the rainbow hues leach out of life (Gudrun’s ever-colourful stocking notwithstanding)?
• Must passion end in death (not necessarily the little one)?

This is a novel of ideas, but I often felt unequal to them. There was so much to wrestle with, I was stripped bare by the dizzying mix of themes, language, passions, lives - and deaths. I had to submit to the experience, though in a rather different way to The Rainbow.

My status on finishing was a single word, “Eviscerated”. Ruminating further, a conversation towards the end is pertinent. One character tells their partner “It’s over”, and the reply is “But it isn’t finished… There must be finality”. In writing this, I think I have found finality. (I will return to Lawrence, though!)

Lawrence wrote this after Wilde, during a war (WW1), and before Waugh. It has the self-consciously clever dialogue of the first and last, in the context of warring relationships: all conflicted between love and hate, artifice and instinct, life and death - murderous desire, even.

The intellectual sparring matches have a theatrical quality, as if the protagonists are speaking for posterity. Then the audience departs, the mask falls, and naturalistic passion, action and imagery blossoms, such as the blissful release for Birkin, rolling naked in the primroses. “He wanted to touch them all… to saturate himself with the touch of them all… It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.” The rarer physical assaults (lapis, wrestling, and in the snow) have greater visceral power as a result.

It seems to say that whatever persona we try to present, however much we try to assert our will (a recurring theme), we’re all animals underneath.

Animals

What a carnal carnival of animals this is. People are likened to, amongst other things: smiling wolf, hermit crab, pouncing hound, octopus, restless bird, “slithering sea-lion”, “funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people”, small cat, dog, cockerel, bird of paradise, rabbit, wild animal, shrew, stallion, “hopping flea”, fish, weasel, voice like a gull, water-spiders, horses, python, “eyes as keen as a hawk”, water-rat, “elegant beetle”, seal, “eyes blazed like a tiger’s”, bat, amphibious beast, eagle, “humble maggot”, wearing “startling colours, like a macaw”, eels, various insects, and “strange moths”!

Gudrun’s art typically features animals and birds, her friendship with Loerke is kindled by a picture of his statue of a naked girl on a horse, and there are actual animals at key points in the story:
• Ursula and Gudrun watch Gerald violently beat his horse to submission, when it is terrified by a train.
• Gudrun confronts an alarming herd of cattle, but finds inner strength (and euythmics).
• A chapter is devoted to Birkin’s cat - given to him by Hermione, and still part of the power she wields over him.
• Another chapter is about a vicious pet rabbit (called Bismarck) that draws blood from Gerald and Gudrun.

Plot

There are four main characters: Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun, only a year younger. They are very close, but it’s also fiery relationship. Both teach at the grammar school: Ursula as a general teacher and Gudrun just art (she is really a sculptor, has travelled abroad, and lived in Bohemian London).

They become involved with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gerald Crich, eldest son of a wealthy colliery owner. Birkin and Gerald have a deep and conflicted relationship with each other. Women in Love - or Men in Love? The Crich family is large, the mother mentally unstable, and the father physically declining. We know nothing of Birkin’s family.

The four go to Innsbruck, where Loerke, a German artist, is added to the increasingly toxic mix of relationships.

Ursula and Gudrun are fiercely independent women, in thought and deed, including their relationships. They are not afraid of what other people think. The problem is that that often can’t decide what they think and so cannot decide what they should do and not do: “His licentiousness was repulsively attractive” and “she was far, far from being at ease with him”. And yet…

The men’s attitudes to women are not as positive or equal. At times, they’re exploitative, at other times, women are considered second best, albeit decorative and convenient.

Towards the end, I feared Lawrence was going to quash all that and have them either settle for conventionality, or suffer for not doing so...

Recurring Themes

Is it better to look at things as a whole, or take them to pieces? “I really don’t want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left in them.” In this review, I've opted for the former.

It is set in age of change: mechanisation, social mobility, equality, and philanthropy. To the father, “in Christ, he was one with his workmen”, but to his son, they “were his instruments” and “What mattered was the great social productive machine.”

Primarily though, this is about relationships:

The types of love, relationships, and marriage considered and entered into is very broad-minded for the time, such as “a mutual union in separateness”. It also explores how/if sex and friendship relate. “She had had lovers, she had known passion. But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God.”

Homosexuality, bisexuality, and non-monogamous relationships suffuse the story. It’s not just the famous naked wrestling: is far less ambiguous than I expected. “I believe in the additional perfect relationship between a man and a man.” Later, "You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal... to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love."

Conflict and duality are present in all the main relationships (love, hate, and whose will will triumph), violence and coercion too. “Always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.” Ultimately, “One of them must triumph over the other”.

There is no escape, “It was a fight to the death between them - or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say” and "She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her... Yet underneath was death itself."

Quotes

• “A strange enmity… very near to love.”

• “I hate subtleties. I always think they are a sign of weakness.”

• “The lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow.”

• “It was rather delicious to feel her drawing his self-revelation from him… And her dark eyes seemed to be looking through into his naked organism… She wanted the secret of him, the experience of his male being.”

• “She seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness.”

• “They always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free of each other. Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each other.”

• “She seemed to grip the hours by the throat, to force her life from them.”

• “It was a sunny, soft morning in early summer, when life ran in the world subtly like a reminiscence.”

• “The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses… over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast.”

• “The broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood… In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines heavily oiled.”

• “Why should you always be doing?” Often, I wanted the characters to do more doing (and less talking).

• “He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her.”

• “On the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk... All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.”

• Pain “gradually absorbed hi life. Gradually it drew away all his potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life.”

• “The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them...Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied.”

• “I want you to drop your assertive will… I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.”

• “He kissed her softly… like dew falling.”

• “Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.”

• Wrestling, “They became accustomed to each other, to each other's rhythm, they got a kind of mutual physical understanding...as if they would break into a oneness… working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room… the strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh. Often, in the white interlaced knot of violent living being that swayed silently, there was no head to be seen, only the swift, tight limbs, the solid white backs, the physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness… The earth seemed to tilt and sway, and a complete darkness was coming over his mind. He did not know what happened.”

• “The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery... the continual splatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying.”

• H's face: “There was something of the stupidity and the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it.”

• “Her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.”

• “She was like a flower just opened in the rain, the heart of the blossom just newly visible, seeming to emit a warmth of retained sunshine.”

• “And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man's body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”

• “She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery... the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.”

• “He seemed to be gathering her into himself, her warmth, her softness, her adorable weight, drinking in the suffusion of her physical being, avidly. He lifted her, and seemed to pour her into himself, like wine into a cup… So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant.

• “She reached up, like Eve reaching to the apples on the tree of knowledge… touching his face with her infinitely delicate, encroaching wondering fingers… Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. This was the glistening, forbidden apple, this face of a man.”

• “To know him, to gather him in by touch... She wanted to touch him and touch him and touch him.”

• “It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion.”

• “There they sat down, folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and become one substance.”

• “His heart went up like a flame of ice.”

• They “found themselves in a vague, unsubstantial outdoors of dim snow and ghosts of an upper-world, that made strange shadows before the stars... It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.”

• “The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow.”

• “It was a fight to the death, she knew it now.”

• “Either the heart would break, or cease to care.”

Moony

One of my favourite passages, from the chapter titled "Moony":
Throwing stones at the moon’s reflection: “Darts of bright light shot asunder, darkness swept over the centre. There was no moon, only a battlefield of broken lights and shadows, running close together. Shadows, dark and heavy, struck again and again across the place where the heart of the moon had been, obliterating it altogether. The white fragments pulsed up and down, and could not find where to go, apart and brilliant on the water like the petals of a rose that a wind has blown far and wide… He saw the moon regathering itself insidiously, saw the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments, in a pulse and in effort of return.” Throw another stone: “Flakes of light appeared here and there, glittering tormented among the shadows, far off, in strange places; among the dripping shadow of the willow on the island.”

Amusing Bafflement

• Chapter VI has three references to “inchoate eyes”, whatever that means.

• “He rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence.” Yes, he’s in a boat, but even so…

• “Her soul was destroyed with the exquisite shock of his invisible fluid lightning… Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body.” Ugh - or LOL?

*Picture sources
Carpet of primroses: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/a7/47/85/a74785badd6c50182276add86e2e2....
Brinsley colliery: http://www.healeyhero.co.uk/rescue/eastwood.htm
Alpine peak: http://il1.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/12292205/thumb/1.jpg?i10c=img.resize(he.... show less

Apparently, while this book was being serialized back in the day, male readers would write to Wilkie Collins asking who the character of the female protagonist, Marian Halcombe, was based on-- so they could propose to her. And I believe it. She's a great protagonist-- spirited but not improperly so, resourceful and clever but not overly so, sympathetic but not pathetically so. This is one of those books that grabs you from around the beginning and just never lets go. Even when you think you've got it all figured out, you feel the need to keep on reading. And Count Fosco is one of the greatest villains ever created, I'm sure; he's no brute like Sir Percival, he's just a little bit off. (But even Sir Percival is ultimately sympathetic.) show more The male protagonist, Walter Hartright, is a bit boring, but I suppose you can't have everything. And he's boring in a forthright, Victorian way, so that's all right. But God, there's some genuinely chilling sequences in this book-- Walter finding the grave of Laura, yes, but even more so, the sequence where Count Fosco gains hold of Marian's journal. Oh wow. I was frightened for her at that point. How could you not be? My friend Christiana is fond of pointing out how this book shows the powerlessness of Victorian women, and by God is she right. It feels almost churlish of me to point out that the ending's a tad too convenient, so enjoyable is the road to getting there. (Oh, and Matthew Sweet's notes in the Penguin Classics edition are some of the best explanatory notes I've ever read; they're entertaining and not condescending, for once. But he did write Year of the Pig after all.) show less