Five-minute digest
The Woman in White
Summary
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum. At Limmeridge Walter meets the nervous invalid Frederick Fairlie, his niece Laura Fairlie, and her half-sister Marian Halcombe, dark, plain-featured, clever and brave. Laura bears a strange likeness to the woman in white, Anne Catherick, whom Laura's late mother once befriended. Walter and Laura fall in love, but Laura is engaged, by her father's dying wish, to Sir Percival Glyde of Blackwater Park, Hampshire. An anonymous letter warns against the marriage; Walter finds Anne cleaning Mrs. Fairlie's gravestone and learns she wrote it. Sir Percival explains Anne's confinement plausibly, and Walter leaves England with an expedition to Central America. The family solicitor, Vincent Gilmore, records how Sir Percival secures Laura's fortune of twenty thousand pounds on her death; the marriage takes place in December 1849. In the second part Marian's diary describes life at Blackwater Park, where Sir Percival, pressed for money, tries to force Laura to sign a document unread, and his friend Count Fosco, an enormously fat, charming Italian with tame white mice and a gift for chemistry, quietly controls everyone. Anne reappears at the boathouse, hinting that she knows Sir Percival's Secret. Marian overhears the two men plotting from the verandah roof in a rainstorm, falls ill with fever, and the Count reads and annotates her diary. In a sequence of short testimonies from Mr. Fairlie, the housekeeper Mrs. Michelson, a cook, a doctor and the tombstone itself, Laura is lured to London, and Anne Catherick, who has died of heart disease, is buried at Limmeridge as Lady Glyde, while Laura is shut in the asylum under Anne's name. Marian rescues her, and Walter, returned, finds both women at the grave. In the third part Walter, living with them in poverty, pursues the truth: Sir Percival's secret is that his parents never married and that he forged the entry in the Old Welmingham marriage register; he dies when the vestry burns as he tries to destroy the evidence. Through Pesca, Walter recognizes Fosco as a traitor to a secret political Brotherhood and forces from him a written confession, after which Fosco flees and is found stabbed in Paris. Laura's identity is restored at Limmeridge, and she and Walter marry; their son becomes heir of Limmeridge. The novel was serialized in All the Year Round from November 1859 to August 1860 and published in three volumes in 1860.
Top Lessons
Evidence told by witnesses
Walter's preamble says the story will be told as a case is told before a judge, by each witness in turn, speaking only of what he or she saw. The method lets Collins show how a crime can be built from gaps between testimonies, and how a careful man can rebuild the truth from the same fragments, down to a single date.
Marian's courage
Marian is the first character whom the reader sees through another's eyes as unfashionable, and she becomes the one Fosco respects most. Her night on the verandah roof in the rain, her watchfulness at Blackwater Park and her rescue of Laura from the asylum make her the moving force of the plot, as Walter acknowledges in the last line.
Identity and its proofs
Laura is declared dead, buried under another woman's name and shut in an asylum as Anne Catherick. The novel asks what a person is in law and society if papers, witnesses and family can be made to deny her, and it lets love and loyalty, not documents, first recognize her.
The clever criminal
Fosco argues at dinner that only fools' crimes are found out, and he nearly proves it. Collins makes him the most charming person in the book, kind to his mice and canaries, cultivated and witty, so that the reader feels the attraction of intelligence without conscience.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”
Frequently cited
“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.”
“She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!”
“Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace”
Frequently cited
“The fool’s crime is the crime that is found out, and the wise man’s crime is the crime that is NOT found out.”
“I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”
“Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde”
“Marian was the good angel of our lives—let Marian end our Story.”
Medical Lens
The plot depends on the private madhouse system of mid-Victorian England, in which a patient could be detained on medical certificates arranged by a relative or a person of standing; Anne Catherick is confined by Sir Percival to keep her silent, and Laura is received under Anne's name, her protests taken as proof of delusion. Collins's portrait of Anne, gentle, confused, fixed on a few ideas and on wearing white, is sympathetic, and the novel leaves her mental state undefined beyond the period's language of a weak or injured mind; modern readings of her condition are interpretive. Frederick Fairlie is a comic study of the nervous valetudinarian who makes illness an excuse for selfishness. Marian's fever after the night in the rain becomes the occasion of a bedside quarrel in which Fosco declares it typhus, blames the treatment and threatens to testify against the family doctor, Mr. Dawson, who denies it; Dawson is soon removed from the case, leaving Fosco's chosen nurse Mrs. Rubelle in charge, a sequence Collins uses to show medical authority being captured. Anne's death from heart disease is certified by a respectable doctor who has no reason to doubt the name he is given, showing how a correct medical certificate can serve a false identity. Fosco's narrative boasts of the power of chemistry and of harmless agents used to make Laura pliable.
- First Epoch, Hartright, IV
The escaped asylum patient on the Hampstead road and the two men who pursue her by chaise.
- Second Epoch, Frederick Fairlie's narrative
Mr. Fairlie's elaborate account of his nerves and his sufferings from noise and light, interrupted by visitors he cannot refuse.
- Second Epoch, Marian Halcombe's diary and Mrs. Michelson's narrative
Marian's fever after the rain, the dispute in which Fosco calls the fever typhus against Mr. Dawson's opinion, Fosco's interference and Mrs. Rubelle's nursing.
- Second Epoch, The Narrative of the Doctor
A brief death certificate recording the death of Lady Glyde from aneurism at St. John's Wood.
- Second Epoch, Hartright's narrative; Third Epoch
Laura's confinement in the asylum under Anne's name, her rescue by Marian through a bribed nurse, and the effects of the ordeal on her memory and spirits.
- Third Epoch, The Story Continued by Isidor, Ottavio, Baldassare Fosco
Fosco's praise of chemistry as power and his account of the drugs used during the substitution.