Have you read the original cliffhanger?

A trendsetting Victorian classic, Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’ deserves to be devoured even today

When the first instalments of Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’ started appearing in Charles Dickens’ journal ‘All The Year Round’ 160 years ago, little could the author have imagined it would be acclaimed as a trendsetting classic of Victorian literature.

‘The Woman in White’ was a sensational novel with its roots deep in the Gothic genre, but with a rich seam of class scepticism running through it. When the story was being published serially in ‘All The Year Round’, the instalments ended in cliffhangers, meant to push the plot along and keep the audience waiting anxiously week after week. It was the 19th century equivalent of the modern TV series, with people cancelling party invitations just so they could stay in and read — The Woman in White — and chill.

And reading it in the novel form, more than a century later, it’s impossible not to get hooked as multiple narrators tell a story involving huge fortunes, evil Italian counts and impoverished art teachers.

It starts off with Walter Hartright, the aforementioned art teacher, meeting a young woman dressed in white on a lonely road in a London suburb late one night. He helps her get into a carriage and not long afterwards, is informed by a policeman that she’d in fact escaped from an asylum. Walter eventually leaves for a job in Cumberland to tutor Laura Fairlie, a young woman from an aristocratic family. He pretty soon —and rather predictably — falls in love with his student. She also happens to be an almost exact double of the strange woman in white. But Laura is meant to marry Sir Percy Glyde who enters the story all but bearing a ‘villain!’ tattoo on his forehead and there’s a complicated marriage settlement that states Glyde will (but, of course) get Laura’s fortune if she were to die without producing an heir. The stage is set for much nefariousness and the entry of the dastardly Count Fosco who is Glyde’s advisor in treachery.

In novels like these, coincidences and clues pile up at a fast and furious pace. But the characters are so well-drawn that it’s a pleasure to spend time in their company. When I first read ‘The Woman in White’, it wasn’t the rather basic romance between Walter and Laura that fired my imagination, but the character of Marian Halcombe. She has been described by various critics as one of the finest creations of Victorian literature and it isn’t hard to see why. Fiercely independent, infinitely loyal and selfless, Marian is endowed with qualities that male writers very rarely give their female creations. Despite not being conventionally beautiful, she’s the one every character is magnetically pulled towards — men, women and readers.

Collins based his book on notorious criminal cases of the time, which only served to heighten its popularity when first published. But the themes of class, women’s legal rights and the hypocrisy of the rich make the novel deserving of a wide readership even now.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a new fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.