Just Finished Reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was a middle-to-late nineteenth century English novelist and a contemporary of Charles Dickens, often collaborating with him.  I discovered him through the historical novel Drood by Dan Simmons, which speculated about the friendly rivalry between the two, among other darker matters.  Intrigued by this story, I decided to read something of Collins for myself and chose The Woman in White, described as one of the first in the mystery genre of novels...

The Woman in White has multiple prefaces to it, and in them the author introduces two important features of the story: one, there is a great attention to the law and how it applies to transfer of property and money between individuals according to marriage and inheritance.  Two, this story is told by multiple narrators who are a part of the story and relate the pertinent events as they experienced them.  This device was new in literature when Collins employed it back in 1859, but I've since read a few novels featuring several first-person narrators.  The setting is primarily England where Walter, a young drawing instructor, is offered a job to teach his craft to an orphaned young woman in Cumberland living at her uncle's estate.  But one night before he leaves for his new position there, he encounters on the street a mysterious woman, all dressed in white, who is desperately fleeing her pursuers.  As a good Samaritan, he helps her to escape and files it all away in his mind as a curious incident, but one without any further relevance to his life.  But we readers already know the story's title, and Walter's encounter with this ghostly, enigmatic figure will come back to haunt him time and time again...

Beyond what I've just described, I had better refrain from going further with the plot in order to avoid spoiling it all in case you might want to read it for yourself.  I will say this: The Woman in White is rooted in its own time...there is deception involved here that we in our own 21st century could have easily cleared up with scientifically more advanced tools.  The heroes are virtuous and the villains either diabolically sly or crude and blustering.  I enjoyed the characters in this story...especially those of the comically obnoxious "uncle" Frederick Farlie, the courageous and compassionate Marian Halcombe, and the voluminous Italian Count Fosco, whose manner and described appearance reminded me of Sydney Greenstreet's sinister Mr. Gutman "Fat Man" character in the 1941 Humphrey Bogart movie The Maltese Falcon.  I enjoyed this book and plan to look into other works of Wilkie Collins...