The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White is, in my opinion, a far greater achievement than The Moonstone, which lagged, quite dreadfully, in its last 200 pages or so. By contrast, The Woman in White only lags for the last ten or twenty pages, which are the denoument, and which are almost insufferable in their maudlin sentimentality. Everything is resolved happily, never you worry, and Collins is sure to reassure his readers of this fact, as well as of the unending beauty, heroism, and intelligence of his main characters.

And this being a Victorian serial, of lesser quality than Dickens, the characters are unendingly beautiful (the gentle, pliable love interest), heroic (the narrator), and intelligent (the "ugly" yet capable sister of the beautiful heroine). This last, in case you can't tell, was my biggest sticking point in the novel: Marian Halcombe was intelligent, capable, brave, amusing, kind, and an all-round wonderful person. Yet, of course, because she was "ugly," or, at the very least, because her "expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete,” she is completely ignored as a possible love interest by everyone. The narrator falls for her beautiful blonde sister, and she, without ever complaining, rescues said sister, toils away for her, and ends by living with her forever, refusing to marry, instead becoming a spinster aunt to the children of the beautiful one. Nobody sees anything strange in this--it is her duty, after all, as the charmless older sister. Yet, to the modern reader, she is infinitely more interesting than her vapid sister, and it is incredibly frustrating to watch her shunted to the side at every moment, even by herself! She herself is quite possibly the worst offender, in fact, and such pearls of misogyny fall out of her mouth ("my courage was only a woman's courage, after all"), as well as the mouth of the narrator (praising a woman recently married he says that she has transformed, for the better, into a "civil, silent, unobtrusive woman, who is never in the way") that one wonders whether Collins really could get away with this, even in the Victorian age.

Apart from my feminist indignation of such mistreatment of a main character, though, this novel has stood the test of time well. After 150 years, I found it still suspenseful, still well-written, and still thoroughly engrossing. Collins is no Dickens--neither his sense of humor nor his sense of secondary characters quite lives up to the standard of his great friend--but it's still very impressive just how readable he is.