The Woman in White Summary: Wilkie Collins's Sensation Novel Explained
What The Woman in White is about
Wilkie Collins published The Woman in White in parts between 26 November 1859 and 25 August 1860. It was his fifth novel, and it is set in 1849 and 1850. It belongs to the Victorian category known as the sensation novel, and it is also treated as an early example of detective fiction, because the methods Walter Hartright uses to gather evidence turn up again in later private detective stories.
The setup is simple and strange. Walter Hartright, a young drawing master, meets a distressed woman dressed entirely in white, lost on a road in London, and gives her directions. He later learns she has escaped from an asylum. Shortly afterwards he takes a post at Limmeridge House in Cumberland, teaching drawing to the household's two young women. There he realises that one of his pupils, Laura Fairlie, looks astonishingly like the woman in white. The household knows her: she is Anne Catherick, a mentally disabled woman who once lived nearby and who adored Laura's mother. It was Laura's mother who first dressed her in white.
From that resemblance Collins builds a conspiracy about money, marriage and legal identity. Laura is already engaged to Sir Percival Glyde, a baronet. Walter and Laura fall in love. Laura receives an anonymous letter warning her against the marriage, and Walter works out that Anne sent it. He also becomes convinced that Sir Percival is the man who put Anne in the asylum. The family lawyer objects to the terms of the marriage settlement, which hands Laura's entire fortune to Sir Percival if she dies without an heir. The marriage goes ahead in December 1849 anyway.
The main characters
Walter Hartright is the central investigator and one of several narrators. Collins drew on memories of his father, the artist William Collins, when creating him. Laura Fairlie is gentle, wealthy and, after her marriage, almost entirely without power. Her half-sister Marian Halcombe is the real engine of the household: sharp, brave, physically bold, and the one who overhears the plot against Laura while hiding outside in the rain, an act that leaves her seriously ill.
Sir Percival Glyde is in financial trouble and increasingly paranoid. His friend Count Fosco, who is married to Laura's aunt, is the colder and cleverer of the pair, and it is Fosco who devises the scheme at the heart of the book. Anne Catherick, terminally ill, keeps insisting she holds a secret that will ruin Sir Percival. Frederick Fairlie, Laura's invalid uncle, is useless in a crisis. Pesca, an Italian language teacher, is Walter's friend and the reason he goes to Limmeridge in the first place. Collins filled the novel with Italian characters, probably drawing on the two years he spent in Italy as a child.
The themes
Identity is the obvious one, and Collins treats it as a legal problem rather than a philosophical one. A person is who the documents, the witnesses and the gravestone say they are. Take those away and no amount of protesting works, as Laura discovers when she is treated as a deluded Anne Catherick by asylum attendants.
Justice is the second thread, and it is slow, private and expensive. Collins had legal training, and the structure of the book shows it. He uses multiple narrators, including nearly all the principal characters, and explains why in his preamble: "the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness". The reader is effectively a juror.
Class and money run underneath everything. Sir Percival wants Laura's settlement of £20,000. She refuses to sign it away. His title and his property rest on a claim that cannot bear inspection. A baronet's standing and a poor woman's testimony are weighed very differently, and the novel knows it.
How it ends (spoilers)
Fosco's plan uses the resemblance between the two women. Laura is lured to London, drugged and placed in the asylum as Anne. Anne dies of her illness and is buried under Laura's name. Marian visits the asylum expecting to find Anne, finds Laura instead, bribes the nurse and gets her out. Walter returns from an expedition to Honduras and the three live in hiding in London while he builds his case.
Sir Percival's secret is that he is illegitimate and therefore has no right to his title or his property. His mother had already been married to an Irishman who left her. Sir Percival forged a marriage record in a village church register, helped by Anne's mother. Anne never knew the secret itself, only that one existed. Sir Percival tries to burn the incriminating register and dies in the flames. A vestry-clerk's duplicate copy of the register survives in a nearby town, and that copy is what proves the forgery.
Why it still matters
The novel has never dropped out of view. Robert McCrum placed it 23rd in The Observer's 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels, and it came 77th in the BBC's Big Read. Its machinery, the multiple witnesses, the patient accumulation of evidence, the ordinary man turned detective, became standard equipment for crime fiction. It suits readers who want a long, plotted Victorian mystery with a genuinely formidable heroine in Marian Halcombe and a villain in Fosco who is more interesting than the man he serves.
