The Complex Portrayal of Women

I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction and was strolling along the lonely high road, idly by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. 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 inquir y on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me So what a chilling scene that is, it's an unforgettable moment from Wookie Geollins' brilliant novel The Woman in White, which was written and published in eighteen sixty. This is the ultimate Victorian thriller, but it's also one of the first examples, I suppose you can call it a very early example in some way of detective fiction and the supreme example of what the Victorians called the sensation novel. So we are in the heart of Victorian England in the book, but beneath the surface of kind of ordinary domestic middle class life, all kinds of horrors and terrors are poised to strike. And as we turn the pages of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins uses multiple different narrators to unfold this mystery y stor of mistaken identity and all kinds of legal entanglements, female courage, madness, which is a great theme of the book, and this sort of forbidden romance. So Tabby, The Woman in White, I think it was your idea to do it. Um, it's an absolute chiller, isn't it? And you've read it before, haven't you? I have, yeah. I read it as a teenager, as with so many of these kind of classic novels. But I do remember thinking that portions of it slightly dragged, certain narrators slightly dragged, and we'll explain that concept in a bit. But I absolutely loved one of the heroines of the novel, uh, Marion, who we'll be describing in due course. Um but yeah, this time around I couldn't put it down, basically. It's a total page turner. I couldn't agree more. So actually I'd read it um also as a teenager, reread it at the weekend, and I was absolutely gripped by it, even though I knew what was coming. Yeah. I think Wilkie Collins it's extraordinary that somebody who was writing so, you know, more than a century ago still has the power to get you to turn the pages. I mean, a couple of his cliffhangers are as exciting as any cliffhanger you will find in any work of modern fiction. There's a sense of tension that drives the whole thing and um and and you know, when you're reading it, you completely escape into his world. Our producer Nicole and I were talking about this yesterday. It's just such good fun, all of it. It's thrilling and it's good fun. And actually a moment I thought so funny. Completely. It's a rare thing that you would say, because often I think when people read Victorian books, they read them slightly dutifully. You sort of think, well, this will be good for me, this will be very wholesome and improving and worthy and whatnot. I mean Wilkie Collins's books at the time were definitely not seen by his contemporaries as worthy and improving. They were seen as shockingly sexy and violent and scary and whatnot. The romanticy of their day. The romanticy of their day. And they actually they still have that power, I think. I think it's still they're still quite sexy and shocking and exciting and and all of this. And and actually here's the thing. What's so fascinating about the Woman in White is not just the book itself, but the stories behind the story. So all the inspirations on which Collins drew the real life cases of you know people who had been locked up in asylums or had escaped from legal entanglements or you know who had been drawn into these nefarious schemes and whatnot. I mean these are fascinating stories in and of themselves, actually. Definitely. But the way that the book is is structured and the way that it's written is also quite interesting and massively builds this the suspense because it's unfolded by multiple narrators, and you know, sometimes in letters, sometimes it's diary entries, there is no kind of omniscient narrator to ground us or root us or give us a sense of reassurance the whole time. It's almost like you're being presented a case with evidence provided by the various characters and it's kind of left to the reader to work out what's going on. Um, and Collins himself actually trained as a lawyer, so you can see that in the way that this is written. Yeah, completely. And the different voices come from different parts of society, don't they? So there's men and women, there are very high status people, but then there are housekeepers and servants and things who are kind of giving their testimony, and you're sort of sifting the evidence the whole time. So it demands something of you as a reader in a very fun and immersive way. You're judging whether you can trust narrators and you you know're piecing together the story um as you read. Now talking about piecing together the story, though we have to be careful with this book, I think in particular to avoid too many spoilers. Yes. Because I know there will be some listeners who haven't read it and who hopefully will be inspired to read it by our episode. So we will tread a fine line. We will obviously have to give some things away, but we'll try not to ruin the book completely and not to give you too much, I guess, from the second half or certainly the last third of the book. Those that have absolutely no interest in reading it, well, there's a lot here for you too. Yeah, that's true. So we start, don't we, with Walter Hartwright. And he is a drawing master, a drawing teacher, and I suppose in some ways he's quite a bland character. You know, so he's our initial narrator. What what can you say about him? He's an upstanding, decent Victorian young man, isn't he? Yeah. Is there anything more than that to him, do you think, Tabby? Um no, I mean not especially. I think, you know, he's as you say, he's decent, he's brave. The one the one interesting thing is once you get into your mind the possibility that maybe you can't trust what he tells you the reader, he comes into a slightly different light. You know, you start to wonder if maybe his feelings aren't always for the person he's meant to have feelings for, you start to wonder how many of the good things or the decent deeds that he does he actually does do. So that makes him slightly more interesting. But yes, on the whole, he's just kind of an upstanding Victorian hero. Yeah. So he is walking back from his mother's house in Hampstead Heath. And this is the opening reading that you and I read, Dominic, so just brilliantly. Um, and he's accosted by this frightened and nervous woman dressed all in white. And he knows that she's running from something, she's fleeing something, and she begins to kind of speak cryptically about some powerful man who has wronged her. Anyway, Walter helps her on her way to London . And then another carriage draws up to tell him that a woman matching her description has escaped from a lunatic asylum. Yes. Walter then travels the next day to Limeridge House in Cumberland, uh, to become a teacher, a drawing teacher for these two young women. But you know, this this encounter with the woman in white stays with him. And there he meets the two ladies in question, this is Marian Holcombe and Laura Fairley, and they are half-sersist. They're very different. Marion is kind of plain and quite swarthy. She is funny and very bright and very curious. You know, the minute that Walter confides in her about having had this encounter, she starts digging into it and almost becoming a detective. By contrast, her half-sister Laura is pretty, pale, angelic, maybe not even not as interesting as her sister, but Laura cru cially is very, very wealthy. She's an heiress, which Marion is not. Yes. So we'll talk about these two characters, because I think so much of the book and your response to the book depends upon the relationship of these two characters. Marion and Laura, these half-sisters. Just one quick observation. That scene where he meets the woman in white is what the time was one of, you know, it was seen by contemporaries as one of the the most memorable, the most exciting scenes in all English literature. And actually I think it kind of still is. Oh, I totally agree. It's an amazing s moment when you're turning the pages, you're just a few pages into the book, and there's this it's a brilliant conceit that the guy's walking and then there's a woman dressed all in white who seems distracted and clearly has escaped from a lunatic asylum and wants to know the way to London and it sticks in your mind as it sticks in Walters. Totally. But I mean 'cause I live quite near Hampstead Heath, so I walk there sometimes and so I was imagining having an encounter like that with kind of dusk drawing in. Yeah. Totally chilling. It is. It's brilliant. So anyway, there he's gone off to Cumberland to teach these two half sisters. They also have a terrible uncle, don't they? Yeah. Called Mr Fairley, Frederick Fairley. Who I find immensely entertaining, I have to say. And he's an absolutely terrible man because he's a massive hypochondriac. He's quite funny. I mean it's the scenes with him are quite funny because he's a sort of he's a bit of a caricature. At one point he describes himself as a bundle of nerves dressed up as a man. Yeah. And um he's incredibly selfish, narcissistic. He's you know, you have to whisper when you're with him because he's bad talking normal volume is bad for his nerves. Yeah, he's quite um he's quite like Mrs. Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, you know, who's always bang on about her nerves. But actually Charles Dance plays him in the TV the BBC TV adaptation of this book very, very well. Charles Dance plays him. I can't imagine that actually. Yeah, but very well. He's just an absolute amoeba of a man. He's got no backbone whatsoever. Yeah. And then so you would think, well the w what what has the woman in white got to do with all these characters? Is she more of like a spectral kind of mirage? Is she more of of like a symbol? But no, she's a character in her own right. So she is a character called Anne Cather ick who basically as a little girl, it turns out, she had been brought to Limeridge and she knew Laura and Marion's mother. So she was connected with the family, wasn't she? Yeah, exactly. And she developed a real attachment to their mother because her mother was was very distant, didn't take very good care of her. And she's she's almost quite simple. Right. Anne Catherine. Which is why she fixates on dressing in white, because the um Marion and Laura's mother once said to her that little girls look prettiest and kind of neatest in white. And ever since then, she's refused to dress in anything else. But then, you know, the first real kind of point of jeopardy comes in because Laura receives a letter who we from we later discover Anne Cather ick warning her not to marry the man that she has been engaged to for a long time, and this is Sir Percival Glyde. And it had been the dying wish of her father that she marry him, even though he's kind of twice her age. Yes. And so she's been engaged him for a long time. But then she gets this letter, and that obviously makes her wary. But then there's another thing. She and Walter Hartwright inevitably have started to develop feelings for each other. So upon discovering that she's engaged, he leaves. Walter is so decent. He goes well he goes to Honduras. That is very Victorian somehow. It is. He's he does the decent thing. He goes away because he knows she's engaged to this aristocrat Sir Percival Gly If you love her, let her go. Exactly, exactly. And basically, even though she loves Walter and even though she's had this letter telling her not to marry Sir Percival, Laura, because she's very dutiful and very Victorian , thinks, well, I'll have to marry him anyway. And she does. And so she marries Sir Percival, who actually we know from the beginning is a kind of bad man, don't we? Because he when he arrives at the house, he pretends to be very polite and courteous and friendly, but Wilkie Collins writes it in such a way that it's blindingly obvious that this is just a front and that actually he's a terrible crook. Yeah, and she makes a big deal about the fact that he's kind of his good looks have gone to seed. Yeah. You know, and that's you know something that we should all be wary of. Um Yeah. The thing that gives him away surely is the fact that he's losing his he Thank you . Thanks, Tabby. I'm glad you've gone. I'm glad you've got that. Here we have a bad seed. Anyway. Yeah. Finally, eventually, despite everyone's misgivings, Laura does marry Sir Percival Glide and they go on hunt this honeymoon. And then they come back and they move into Superstival Glide's kind of estate. Um, and this is a very kind of dark and gloomy place called Blackwater Park, and Marion goes to live with them too. But there also in residence are two other very important characters, and this is Count Fosco. He's a good friend of Sir Percival Glyde, and he's married to Madame Fosco, a very malevolent character, and um she is Laura's aunt. And so by virtue of the fact that Lau ra is inheriting this vast fortune, she is not. So she's losing out on a lot of money, thanks to Laura. And Dominic, tell us a bit about Count Fosco, because he is such an iconic character. He's very camp. He's one of the supreme Victorian villains and uh Count Fosco he's an amusing villain though. He's brilliant. He's enormously fat. He's constantly eating fruit tarts and sort of stroking mice and he has pets, I don't know, canaries and cockatoos or whatever they are. And he's very courteous in a sort of very um over-the-top Italian way. But then you realise quite quickly that he is a malevolent and kind of calculating um customer. And he is basically manipulating Sir Percival Glide so that they're in cahoots, these two characters. Yeah. And you can tell quite early on, I think. You worry for L aura and her fortune and indeed her sister Marion. But there's this terrible sense of entrapment as well at Blackwater Park. And and the powerlessness of these two women faced with like the system and these two men, because all of their efforts basically, there's this at one point Sir Percival tries to get Laura to sign something to sign away a large part of her fortune to him. And she resists all of Marion's efforts to write these letters to their lawyers in London to kind of get help and kind of free them from this dilemma. You know, Count Fosco and Madame Fosco are going into the post bag and checking their letters and they go and they talk to um you know Laura's lady in waiting to kind of make sure that she doesn't go Yes, exactly. There's a suffocating atmosphere. Basically at the mercy of these two guys. Sir Percival, who's drinking more and more and clearly has run out of money, and is basically it becomes very, very obvious that he has married Laura for her money and he's determined to get his hands on it one way or another. And then Count Fosco, who you can't have an argument with him because he's always performatively very polite and courteous. But there's a sort of coldness in his eyes and behind his smile that as he eats another fruit tarts. He is plotting your downfall. Exactly. And also, you know, tickling white mice. He has a real thing for white mice, for birds, for parrots, and for uh fruit tarts. So this makes him extremely malevolent. He's the one that the two sisters start to really fe ar 'cause they know that he's got some real brains behind that sort of florid plump face. Exactly. Then we have the reappearance of the woman in white, because Anne Catherick appears to warn the sisters once more, and she lets slip that Sir Percival has some great secret that if it were shared with the public at large, he would be basically destroyed and brought down. I mean, let's not give that away, because that's you know, when you're reading the book you you want to find What is Sir Percival's secret that will that could destroy him? And can the two can these two young women find it and use it against them? But there is another dark secret, isn't there? Yeah, there is. So there's m there are many, many twists. Marion tries to uh she tries to spy on Percival and Fosco in this fantastic, fantastic scene where she's so intrepid, Marion. She climbs out of the window, she's basically on a kind of terrace in the pouring rain, eavesdropping, you know, very sort of um like James Bond or something. Yeah. And she then catches a chill because she's been eavesdropping on Count Fosco and Sir Percival while they've been unveiling their plans, she falls ill and is basically stuck in a different bit of the house, and that means that Laura, her sort of pretty sister, is totally at their mercy and they're able then to pull off their r their really, really sinister scheme against Laura, aren't they? Huge spoiler alert here, yeah. So what they do is they recapture Anne Catherick, who it turns out is already dying. She has a heart condition. And then they trick Laura into going to London where she thinks Marion is. And when she arrives there, they drug her. And when she wakes up, she essentially wakes up in a lunatic asylum. Because what they've done is they have swapped her identity with Anne Catherick's. So they have said that Laura has died, Lady Glyde has died. They put Anne Catherick in her coffin, bury her in her grave next to her mother. Meanwhile Laura is trapped in this asylum and you know being told that she is Anne Catherick. So this allows Sir Percival to say my wife has died, he can claim all her inheritance and her estate and whatnot. And meanwhile, poor Laura is totally you know, she is powerless, she's in the asylum, and when she says, I'm actually Laura Fairley, or or Laura Glyde as she now is, the sort of warders say, No you're not, you're Ancatharic, you've gone mad. And she can't get out. There's no way she can get out. Well or well or is that or is that? Because Marion is so intrepid that basically Marion is able to rescue Laura, isn't she? She's able to go to the asylum and bribe. She bribes one of the She bribes the nurse to get um Laura free. Anyway, then they team up with Walter, who's back in England and who, upon visiting Laura's grave, heartbroken, oh what a great scene this is. Sees the two sisters veils. Amazing scene. And is like, oh my god, she's alive. This is one of the great moments in English fiction, I think, when Wal Walter goes to the grave and he sees that the woman he fell in love with has died and then he looks up and there's these two veiled women, who are they? And one of them is her. He can't believe it. And they kind of team up to try to bring down Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde by discovering and exposing his secret, which we will not be revealing. But we will be revealing some other crucial information after the break. We will. So um obviously this is a it's a complicated story, but it's a thrilling story, and it's actually worth pausing to say. If it's thrilling for us, imagine how much more melodramatic it would have seemed to the Victorians. And it's the product of the genius of one man, Wilkie Collins, but it's also a product of the obsessions of the Victorian period. So maybe Tabby, we'll start with the man himself. Yes. Wilkie Collins. Tell us a little bit about Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins is born in Marlybone in London on the 8th of January 1824. He's the eldest son of the eminent landscape artist William Collins, who actually served as um partially the inspiration for Walter Hartwright in the book. He's pulled out of uh school as a boy and they go travelling around Europe and he says that during that time, you know, living in Italy and France, he learned more than he ever did at school. Then he returned to England and went to a boarding school, which he loathed, very Victorian, somehow, you know, faintly Nicholas Nickleby. And he apparently allegedly started telling stories because he was bullied. And in order to kind of wriggle out of the clutches of this school bully or distract him, he would tell him stories . You know, he wrote, It was this brute who first awakened in me, his poor little victim, a power of which but for him I might never have been aware. No way. That's a good story. He was he was an odd looking chap. He was born with a large bulge uh on the right side of his forehead. He was only five foot six and he had a disproportionately large head and and large shoulders, but very small feet and hands. Because of kind of this thing on his head, he was forced to wear glasses from a young age and his eyesight really suffered in later life. And he he had quite a kind of unconventional bohemian lifestyle, you know, he famously loved good food and wine. He dressed very flamboyantly, and he spent much of his time travelling abroad, which he loved. He leaves school. He um is apprenticed to a tea merchant, that doesn't really work out. He starts writing, he trains as a barrister, but he never really practices law. So although the legal training plays a part in the way he structures this book, he's actually never really been a lawyer, although he's interested in it. He makes his money from journalism and he starts contributing to literary journals, and this is when he meets Dickens. So Charles Dickens is by far the most important influence on Wilkie Collins. And they're very, very close, aren't they? So clearly Dickens has a massive influence on him in a literary sense . So serializ ation, cliffhangers, a sort of melodramatic plot, all of this kind of thing. And Count Fosco, for example, this sort of white mice and fruit tart fancying Italian villain. He's quite a Dickensian character in that he's larger than life, he's melodramatic, he's extravagant, all of this. Yeah, and also Dickensian characters often have these kind of minute details, they have certain traits or characteristics or habits. But actually, when I was rereading it this time , I kept thinking about Bleak House and so yeah, you can definitely definitely see the the parallels. Yes. So Dickens and Collins will travel together and through Dickens he becomes pals with lots of writers and artists and it's Dickens who keeps giving him kind of breaks Now there are a couple of things about Wilkie Collins that are kind of clues to the nature and the interests of this book. First of all, you've already mentioned this with his bulging head. He has very poor health . So he's constantly got gout and headaches and boils and all of this kind of thing. He he takes various remedies. So Turkish baths. There's electric baths. Have you ever had an electric bath? No, what's an electric bath? So an electric bath. Sounds lovely. No, it's bonkers. Yeah, you'd sit under a machine that basically zapped you with static electricity so your hair would stand up on end. I bet I'd come out of it glow ing. Well, apparently Benjamin Franklin was a big believer in this. Good looking man. People were still doing electric baths until the end of the 19th century, and then doctors said, This is insane. Like this is why are you doing this? It's not making you better at all. So there's electric baths. Uh Collins was hypnotized. He took lots of quinine. But above all, his big thing was laudanum, which is a mixture of opium and alcohol. And in those days you could get Lauden ham over the chemist's counter. It was sold as, for example, Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup. And uh Collins' doctor said to him, Take this basically, this opium and alcohol mixture for your gout. He took so much of it that he became completely addicted. He would have these it's a h hallucinogen. So he would have these visions that he was being I love this detail. This is from um Matthew Sweet, a friend of mine, wrote a brilliant essay about the Woman in White, which is the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. And he points out in this that uh Collins had these visions where I'll quote a monstrous green woman who sprouted a pair of tusks. Oh my god. That's what happens if you take too much laudenum. A surgeon told well at dinner once told Wookie Collins said you're taking so much lauden um that basically you're taking enough laudanum every day to kill ever ybody at this table. Because basically he developed a resistance to it. And you know, that sort of sense of reality slipping out of control, your health is on the verge of collapse at any moment. That runs all the way through his fiction, not just The Woman in White, but all his other sensation novels. It definitely does. And then the other thing is his personal life. So tell us about his personal life, because I know you know about this. Yeah, so he had two main relationships throughout his life, two women. He married neither of them. The first was a woman called Caroline Graves, who was a widow with a young daughter, and he lived with her for the best part of thirty years. She claimed that she was the daughter of a gentleman and that her husband had been a gentleman, but in truth, her father was a carpenter from Gloucestershire, and her husband was a shorthand writer from a family of stonemasons. Anyway, she and her daughter Harriet lived together from 1858. Then they had a brief separation when the second woman in Collins' life came onto the scene. But then after that, they lived together for most of their life. But this was not kind of thought proper. It was never something they acknowledged in public . She, to the world at large, was seen as and named as his housekeeper. You know, he wouldn't exactly take her to social parties or anything like that. Then this second woman was called Martha Rudd. They met when he was 40 and she was 19, so as we will see later, that's something very Charles Dickens about that. Um, and he put both of his mistresses in two separate houses a short walk away from each other, and um when he was with Martha, they pretended to go by Mr. and Mrs. William Dawson and that's the name that their three children inherited. So you can see from this Wilkie Collins's like slightly cynical attitude towards the kind of the mores and the morals of Victorian society at large, kind of Victorian establishment with its very proper households, its, you know, patriarchal households, you know, the married angel and and the kind of hard working gentleman. And I think you can see that in um The Woman in White as well. Yeah, his own life is a sort of rebuke to the standards of the day. Um and so to some degree I think almost all of his novels are running counter to the expectations and the conventions of the time, which actually brings us quite nicely to the historical context. So we're in Victorian Britain in the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties, and as you say, Tabby, this is the high point of the idealised patriarchal Victorian family. Set in part by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Yeah, of course. And the idea that the you know Laura Laura Fairley, the heroine of the book, is your classic ide alised Victorian maiden. She's beautiful, she's polite. Dutiful, obedient. Yes, exactly. But Marion, in creating Marion, he's created a character that is rebellious. She's transgressive, yeah. Yeah, transgressive, exactly. Now that that's not the only interesting thing about the culture of the time, I think. So I mentioned um Matthew Sweet's essay. He's brilliant about this because this is I think what his PhD was on on was sort of sensation fiction and how it related to Victorian culture. And well he basically says we get the Victorian's completely wrong, because we think it's all stiff collars and stuffed shirts and whatnot. But in fact, they had a massive appetite for novelty and for gadgets and for um shocks and excitement. That this the 1850s was an age of spectacles and freak shows, all kinds of things like panoramas and dioramas and zootropes that you would go and see at fairs and at carnivals and at sort of great public celebrations. And a lot of these things were designed to manipulate and trick you, and you would get a kind of thrill from finding that you'd been deceived, kind of illusions almost. Yeah. What goes hand in hand with that? There's a new kind of journalism because um the newspaper stamp tax was uh repealed in eighteen fifty six, so people are producing cheaper newspapers, many more of them, and they're competing with each other by telling ever more sensational stories about crimes and scandals and marital disasters and all of these kinds of things. And at the same time, if you're growing up in the Victorian era, you are reading Penny Dreadfalls, which are cheap stories, sensational stories about highwaymen and adventures and pirates and detectives and all of this. So what this means is that when Wilkie Collins , when Dickens says to him, Would you like to write me for my magazine all the year round? I'd like to write me a really exciting story. The market is there for something that is sensational and shocking. You know, the Victorians already want it, and Collins is the man who's going to supply it. And the Woman in White, which is serialized between November 1859 and August 186 0, offers Victorian readers a more thrilling and sensational experience than any book that they have ever had before. It's all about tricks and manipulation and madness and twists, you know, narrative twist s. And uncertainty. I think that's such a big part of it actually. There's no you know how you would read um I don't know, Jane Austen or George Elliot or or indeed Dickens. Yeah. There's there's usually a narrator who is you sort of associate with the author, and the narrator is the is omniscient. The narrator knows everything, and you are safe in the narrator's hands. Giving you a hint about how to think about the characters. A little bit of a clue. Yes, completely. You don't get that in this. No, you don't know whether to trust anything that the characters are telling you. Sometimes the characters are telling you things that are downright wrong. So when Frederick Fairley, who's the massive hypochondriac, the bundle of nerves pretending to be a person, when he tells you, you know, his version of events, the whole time you're just thinking, Well, you're an idiot. And and you know you've completely misread what's going on here. And the other thing that um Matthew Sweet points out is that because the characters are telling us the story themselves, when these incredibly exciting things happen to them, like they're drugged or they're kidnapped or they're tricked or they're terrified in some way, it's so much more immediate and immersive than if there was a narrator between you know mediating it all. So you're it's as though it's happening to you in real time. And actually he quotes a novelist and critic of the time called Margaret Oliphant, forgotten today, but a huge figure at the time. And she didn't like sensation fiction, but she said that it felt so much more immediate. So when Walter first meets the woman in white, Mrs. Oliphant wrote, The shock is as sudden, as startling, as unexpected, and as incomprehensible to us as it is to the hero of this tale. Because it feels as though we are Walter and it is happening to us. Now interestingly, she thought this was terrible. She thought it was too violent, too shocking. I mean you made the comparison with antic. Last week we did a Court of Thorns and Roses, didn't we and at the time and and lots of people think, oh gosh, that's rubbish and it's you know it's polluting literary tastes and all this. But people thought that about this fiction. Well we discussed that. We discussed how kind of every age has its next great kind of sensational novel that people say is destroying literacy and and corrupting people's minds and stuff. It's always the way. And it's so interesting that now this book, which a lot of people would consider, you know, a bit hefty, maybe a bit unwieldy from the outside, maybe a bit intimidating, at the time, this was that. It's so interesting. And we know that people loved it, don't we? Because people would um talk about it at dinner and stuff. And there are lots of Victorian bigwigs who were addicted to it. Yeah, well, I mean, famously, um, William Gladstone, the Prime Minister at the time, he cancelled a trip to the theatre in order to continue reading it, which is just great. I I so approve of that behaviour. So there's merch, isn't there? There's woman in one. Yeah, great merch. Perfume c cloloak aks bonnet. Would you wear a woman white bonnet? No, but I'd like to see you in one. Also, interestingly, there was a revival in the name Walter, which is so interesting. People wanted to copy the hero, so I don't know may,be it's like if if um loads of little boys have been called ha called Harry after the Harry Potter books became massive or something. And then also, which is also excellent, there was a trend for naming cats after Count Fosco. I'm gutted I missed out on that. Well did he recently reveal that you named one of your pets? Well, no, actually two of them, so I named my dog Zelda. Well actually I my brother named my dog Zelda after Zelda Fitzgerald and um I named my cat Serafina after Serafina Pecola from um the Northern Knights. Very literary menagerie. Not one inch of that insisted upon itself. No, not at all. So effectively what Wilkie Collins has done with this book, The Woman in White, is he has invented a literary genre . And I think what he's done is he's taken the violence and the horror that people associated with older books. So actually Wuthering Heights, the very first book that we did in this podcast, is a good example. Weathering Heights is like often seen as the last great gothic novel. So the Gothic novels that had flourished in the late eighteenth century, they're all kind of malevolent counts and women being locked up in towers and terrible family secrets. And what Wilkie Collins does in The Woman in White is he takes all that and he brings it back to modern England and he puts it in a world where people are having cakes and they're going on trains. He situates it in a drawing room as well. Yes. Domestic settings. A bit like we said of Agatha Christie when we were doing our Sherlock Holmes episode. Yes, I think that's a good I think that's actually a very good comparison. That there are people who are the the settings seems quite in a way quite humdrum. It's quite banal. You know, Walter is just an ordinary, quite boring, Victorian art teacher. And he thinks that nothing exciting will ever happen to him. And all of this this stuff, which is so baroque and so bonkers, people being locked up in asylums, is happening in the heart of mid-19th century ordinary England. And that's what makes it so thrilling. To the chime of the dinner gong or whatever. You know, people are still dressing for dinner, even though after dinner they're being drugged and shoved into asylums. Exactly. And uh Collins had an express I love the expression, he said this was taking place in the secret theatre of home. Brilliant. So that even in your kind of middle class home or something, there will be all kinds of m madness and secrets and horror and and malevolence and whatnot. And yeah, this gave rise to the sensation novel. There were lots of imit ators. So there's a writer called Mary Elizabeth Braddon who wrote a book called Lady Audley's Secret, one of the best selling novels of this period. Actually another brilliant book. All sorts of poisoning and bigamy and fake deaths and stuff. Um I really recommend it. But nobody did it better than Collins himself because he did this book, he did No Name, he did Armadale, and then the last of the great four books that he wrote in the eighteen sixties was The Moonstone, where he sort of took one step further and he turned this into what looks like the formula for detective fiction. So clues, red herrings, the big reveal at the end. Yeah. The tragedy for him, I would say, is that he writes loads more after the eighteen sixties, but none of it is as good again because his sort of more crusading preachy side takes over at the expense of his entertaining narrative melodramatic side. So his books become a little bit preachy. They're all about kind of marriage reform and legal reform and things. They're never quite as exciting. And then he died in eighteen eighty nine. Um bizarre story actually here's he he was in a a cab accident. He was thrown out of a cab and injured. And then he got bronchitis and then he had a stroke and then he died at the age of sixty five. I mean he'd been in really bad health beforehand. But it's a kind of a shame that he died in such a weird way. Yeah, that was the end of Wilkie Collins. It is really sad actually. I like the thought that he had sort of quite a colourful, exuberant life while it lasted. With his two mistresses. But we've only just kind of scratched the surface of the woman in white and particularly kind of the dark secrets behind it. You know, so what what the book reveals about the insanity fever haunting 19th century imaginations, the sex and violence beneath the surface. But also, there are real life inspirations behind the woman in white. There are real cases that um inspired the story , and we will be delving into those after the break. Welcome back everybody to the book club. Now the woman in white is a mystery novel above all, and we have promised to unveil some of its secrets. We won't spoil it if you haven't read it, but we will talk about some of the mysteries behind the book if you like. So first of all, the identity of the woman in white. I mean this is a massive thing, isn't it, Tabby? So in the book, quite early on, we we know who this is. We know that the woman in white is this woman, Anne Catherick, who looks just like our heroine Laura Fairley and who has escaped from a lunatic asylum. But, you know, scholars have spent loads of print arguing about who the woman in white really is, because there undoubtedly were real life examples of women in w women in white as it were, from whom Wilkie Collins got the idea. And the first possibility is that the woman in white was basically somebody we've already mentioned, which is his lover, disguised as his housekeeper, Caroline C You know, it's no coincidence that people talk and talk about this and have their different theories and stuff because I think Collins himself maybe slightly mythologized this encounter himself. So he is said to have had this run-in with a mysterious woman in white himself, and that this directly influenced Walter Hartwright's encounter, first encounter with um Anne Catherick. He was said to have been strolling home one night from a party in eighteen fifty eight with his brother and, of course the famous painter, John Everett Millet. And Millay's son wrote a biography of his life and recorded this encounter in the biography. So he said that their conversation was suddenly arrested by a piercing scream which came from a house nearby . Before they could decide what to do, the gate swung open and a woman, young, beautiful woman dressed in white, ran out into the three of them, and she kind of paused in front of them for a moment, uh, terrified. And then suddenly coming to her senses, she raced off again into the shadows. And then Millet is said to have said, What a lovely woman. Um Yeah. Jolly good show, yeah. And then um Collins is said to have said, Oh, I must find out who she is and and run after her. And then the next day when people said, Oh, what happened? Who was the woman? He was quite quiet about it, didn't give much away . But he did reveal that she was a young lady of good birth and position who'd accidentally fallen into the hands of a man living in a villa in Regents Park, and he had kept her there im,prisoned for months many , under threats and under some kind of mesmeric influence, very gothic that there's always a maiden trapped in a castle under the mesmeric influence of some kind of dark antagonist. And then that eventually in desperation she'd fled, and that's when she ran into the three young men. And that's how his relationship with Caroline started. Yeah. The woman in question was Caroline Graves, and this is said to be how they met and how their relationship of, you know, thirty years or so started. Do we believe it? I think probably not. I think it's it's slightly exaggerated. You know, it's super melodramatic. It's full of kind of gothic horror themes. And also, it's likely that he had met Caroline Graves in 1856, so almost two years earlier. But then there's another possibility. Oh, the Henrietta Ward story. So this is a story told by the painter Henrietta Ward. She was m married to Collins' great friend uh Edward Ward. So they're both called Ward, but that's a coincidence. And that she got engaged to him at the age of fourteen, which I think is too young. I I think that's not a controversial opinion. And Collins was visiting them one day and she said, Oh, let me tell you about this local woman in Slough called Mrs. Coffin . Mrs. Coffin, apparently, would dress in white like a ghost and she'd go around and scare children playing in the cemetery after dark. And Mrs. Ward said later that Collins walked home all the way across Hamstead Heath thinking about Mrs. Coffin and, that this gave him the idea for the woman in white. And my verdict on this is it's perfectly possible, but we only have her word for it. Yeah. And actually, there are much more interesting possible sources than Mrs. Coffin. So let's go to the third one, which is a French one. This is a uh sort of compilation of scandalous criminal trials in French that Collins had bought at a bookstall in Paris in eighteen fifty six. And it was called the Recoil des Causes Célèbres by Maurice Mejon. And Maurice Mejon basically went through all the French court records and he found the most sensational ones. And Collins then bought this book and he ripped it off and he wrote magazine articles about the most exciting cases. Yeah. And there was one case in particular that grabbed his attention and will surely interest listeners who are interested in the woman in white. So it was the story of a French noblewoman called with the excellent name Adelaide Marie Rogre Lucian de Champignelle, who was the Marquise de Du o? Masterful. And she lived, I'm just showing off. I know. And she lived in the in the eighteenth century. And basically , she inherited this estate, and her brother tricked her out of it with the help of one of their female relatives. So the female relative drugged the Marquise de Duo with some poison snuff. She had this huge headache after taking this snuff and, she passed out , and when she woke up, she found that she was in the Soult Petrier Mental Asylum on the outskirts of Paris. And she woke up and she said, What's going on? I'm the Marquise de Duo, let me out. And the attendant said to her, No, you're not. You are Madame Blanville. We have been told that you're mad, you think you're the Marquise, but you're not. She eventually managed to get out, uh the Marquise de Duo and her brother had her imp arrested as an imposter. I mean that's that's extraordinary. He's really doubling down. Yeah. Basically all her servants said, No, no, no, this is the real person, but her brother got away with it. She died in poverty without ever recovering either her fortune or her own identity. And in this account, Mejon mentions that when she was locked up in the asylum, she was wearing a white dress. So clearly, since we know that Colin's read this, we know who's interested in it, this obviously is one of the inspirations for the story of Laura Fairley swapping her identity involuntarily with Anne Catherick and finding that she has been locked up in a lunatic asylum. But it's not the only one, so there are other stories from England, aren't there? Yeah, and this fourth possibility is I think probably one of the most famous because it was very famous in um England at the time. Yeah. And this one this one is very creepy actually. So this is a woman called Louisa Notage, and she was a wealthy woman from Essex, and she and her four sisters became the followers of Reverend Henry James Prince, who was a revivalist clergyman. He found ed this millenarian sect called the Agapemony and the Abode of Love in Somerset. When their father died in eighteen forty four, all four sisters inherited a vast sum of money, six thousand pounds , which today would be about six to ten million pounds. And Prince, this this you know, charismatic kind of cult leader, persuaded three of Louisa's sisters to marry members of his sect so that he could gain control of these vast fortunes. And when it looked as though Louisa might do the same, her mother took drastic action and ordered her son and her son-in-law to forcibly abduct Louisa from her home and imprison her in a villa in London. There, when she continued to kind of say, insist upon, you know, Reverend Prince's divinity and and righteousness and all that , her family had her certified insane, um citing religious monomania. I mean are they the baddies there or are they the good I d you know, I don't know. When I first read this I was like, oh no no no the family of the baddies. You should never ever do that. But I think it's it's a lose-lose on all sides, I'd say. Because she's about to give away her fortune to a guy who's clearly a bad man, a cult leader. I get the sense that her family are quite keen on rather than kind of protecting her from a scary cult leader, I think they're quite keen to get their hands on the on the dough on the money. To be honest, I think if my a relative of mine was going to give all our family's money to a mem a man who set up who set up something called the abode of Love. I would undoubtedly I would undoubtedly have them locked up for insanity. The title alone would have you taking drastic action. I'm sorry, you've lost me with the abode of love. Anyway, so she was put in a in a in Moorcroft House Asylum, wasn't she? Yeah, very n nasty. But she managed to escape in January 1848. She was then recaptured, so very Anne Catherine. And then her story reached the commissioners in lunacy, and they ordered her release in May 1848. Um, and she successfully sued her family for false imprisonment. And the judge, uh, Lord Chief Baron Pollock famously ruled: You ought to liberate every person who is not dangerous to himself or to others. And this sparked a massive public debate at the time about , you know, legal liberties and the medical authority, i.e., making sure people weren't thrown into asylums without proper examinations, without more than one person kind of decreeing them insane. Yeah, then what well I suppose it raises the question, you know, what is insanity and all this kind of thing, which is too big a subject for us to Yeah, for the first time actually. Because people started to see insanity as rather than kind of like a s almost like something that suddenly came upon people that existed in your body. They started to treat it like an illness rather than A moral condition. Yeah, as a moral condition or like a haunting or a possession. Yes, exactly. So the well, the mid nineteenth century is the time when you know people are fascinated by medicine, they're fat I mean, they're uh like us, they're fascinated by mental health and ill health and arguing about exactly how you define it and all of this kind of thing. And this undoubtedly did influence the woman in white as well, didn't it? Because we know that Charles Dickens wrote about it at the time, so it doesn't it seems likely that if Charles Dickens knows about it, he's interested in it, then so would his friend Collins. He was personally interested in it. Yes. Well we'll come on to this. So I mean it's a massive scandal and actually you mentioned the commissioners and lunacy who are these people whose job it is to decide these kinds of things. So one of them was a guy called Brian Proctor, who was a medical witness at the trial at the Notage trial and actually the woman in white is dedicated to this guy. Yeah. So Collins is clearly fascinated by this issue. And I think that's partly because at the precisely the point where he comes up with the idea for the Woman in White and is writing it, the issue of lunacy is is being hotly debated in all the newspapers because there have been these kind of lunacy panics, what historians call lunacy panics, where there'll be great scandals about people being locked up against their will for financial gain. And I think there are, was it four of them in eighteen fifty eight alone making Deliberate attempts to incarcerate people for insanity and it was four people who were who were sane, two men and two women. So yeah, as you say this, was this was a huge public outcry around this. Um and the people that suffered worst, you know, when it came to being kind of illegally incarcerated were often Victorian wives who were known to have been kind of involuntarily committed to asylums by kind of incompetent or corrupt doctors, not for their well being, but for the convenience of their husbands or possibly because there was some kind of fortune at sta Right. Um you know, they were you it it would it was it was kind of used to silence disobedient wh disobedient wives. I suspect that this too has been slightly um mythologised. Well there's a case, isn't it, that's very well known to Collins himself. So one of his friends or one of his former friends is trying to do this to his own wife. I think this was definitely, definitely also another inspiration for the woman in white, because it happened about two years before he wrote the novel. So this is Rosina Bulwer Lytton. She was born in 1802. She was the daughter of a woman's rights advocate and an Anglo-Irish landowner. And then in 1827, she married a very good friend of Wilkie Collins's, and this is Edward Bulwellyton, who was a novelist and a politician. And he he's the man actually that coined the phrase the pen is mightier than the sword. And also , uh, it was a dark and stormy night. Yes, and he yeah, and he's a playwright. Uh he was a huge figure, literary figure for the Victorians, though totally forgotten today, really. And he wrote a play that both Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens acted in . So they knew him very well. He's married this woman, Rosina, but he's seriously unfaithful and they end up separating and Rosina loses her children. Yeah. He takes her children away from her, which I think would enrage any woman. Yes. And she wrote an she wrote a novel, didn't she, caricaturing her own husband, called Cheevely or the Man of Honour. I admire that. Twenty years or so go by and Bulwellyton is standing in a by election as a Conservative parliamentary candidate and he's speaking at the hustings. And who should turn up but his wife, Christina? You could so see this happening to Boris Johnson, couldn't you? You could. Who loudly denounces him. Uh, you know, you're a c you're a rake you're You're a what? A rake. What do you think I was saying? I don't know, you said you're a k Oh right . Well she probably thought that. She she says, You're a terrible man, you're all this, that and the other. And he says, Well you're you're bonkers. And then he what did he do? He got two thugs to drag her away and commit her to a an asylum in Brentford. So two doctors, John Connolly and L. Forbes Winslow, who were very eminent mad doctors as they were called, certified her as insane, Bow Wellitton's bidding. And uh he got I I I I fell down a massive rabbit hole y last night reading about this. So he persuaded his cr some of his cronies in the press like the Times not to report the the the story, but the Daily Telegraph um could not be bought and basically led the campaign. That's the first. And these doctors had to admit that they were they got it wrong and that she was actually sane and she was let out again. Yeah. And uh Matthew Sweet in his excellent piece about the woman in white says this clearly is um is an inspiration . And actually, Rosina, when she read The Woman in White, she said, Oh, this is absolutely brilliant. Because Sir Percival Glyde, like Edward Bull itton, is past his prime, he's balding, he's bad tempered , he's locked his wife in a lunatic asylum. And Rosina wrote to Collins and said you know, while he was the book was being serialized and said, I'm loving this, I love this. I'll give you more details. And she said the the the man you're writing about, your villain, quote, is alive and is constantly under my gaze. In fact, he is my husband. Brilliant. Which wife hasn't thought that at some point or another. Yeah, exactly. Well, so there's one more twist, and this is about Dickens. And Tabby, you found this, didn't you? I did. I did some digging. Well, Googling. I I delved deep into the archives of public information. So tell us about Dickens. So obviously, Charles Dickens, kind of the greatest celebrity of the Victorian period, very good friend of Wilkie Collins, as we have seen. And in 1857, Dickens is middle-aged. He has been married to his wife, Catherine , your kind of ultimate Victorian matriarch, for about 21 years. And at this point, then he embarks upon an affair with an 18-year-old actress called Ellen Ternan. It's kept secret from the public or as much as possible because he needs to maintain this kind of vision of himself as you know a compassionate, respectable family man. But it i gossip about it is swirling in kind of literary circles. So finally he estranges himself from Catherine. And this domestic upheaval inspired this trip that he and Wilkie Collins went on to Cumberland, which inspired large portions of the women in white, you know, the the train journey, the water heart right takes up there. That's the journey that they took. Um and he wrote, I want to escape from myself, my blackness is inconceivable, indescribable, my misery amazing. Right. So there's one kind of side story in this that you know may have had a part to play in the book. So during this walking tour, well they come across this hall on the outskirts of uh Maryport, and it was said to be haunted by a woman in a white dress, and they came across this kind of ghostly legend in this Yet another woman in white. Caroline Graves. Yeah. So it's I wonder if that kind of led to him exaggerating that encounter. But more importantly, eight years after Dickens died , his wife, his estranged wife, Catherine, confided to her neighbour, Edward Dutton Cook, that her husband had once tried to have her locked up as a madwoman, kind of in the vein of the stories that we've been telling. What's the evidence for this? Well, there was a letter written by the neighbour in question, and this was discovered a few years ago by this Dickens scholar, John Bowen. It was amongst this massive cache of letters found at Harvard. So in this letter the neighbour says Catherine had borne her husband ten children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing, but bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity, he could not quite rest it to his purpose. So according to this scholar Bowen, the plan was halted by the doctor who refused to confirm that Catherine was in fact insane. The doctor Bowen suggests was this guy, Thomas Harrington Tuke, who was the superintendent of Manor House Asylum in Chiswick? Tuke was a friend of Dickens, but then they became estranged around this time, so it all kind of fits. So yeah, so Dickens has clearly taken inspiration from the stories that he and Collins have been discussing and he sort of thinks, Yeah, she's she's had ten kids, she's getting on a bit. Maybe I'll just get rid and look up yeah I'll lock her up in a mental asylum. Do you think that's shameful from Dickens if so? Shameful. The thing is we don't know. It's just based on a story that she's told her neighbour who's then told it to a friend, I suppose. Exactly. Um but I suppose not necessarily impossible. So the irony of all this is that at the time when the Woman in White came out, that some of the critics said, gosh, it's so sensational, it is so shocking, it's so lurid, and this is debasing the literary tastes of the nation. But the fact is it's just so it's so deeply grounded in the realities and in the concerns of the day. The understandable outcry about these women who were already pretty powerless compared with their husbands because of property laws of the time and the way that the legal system works, being locked up against their will in asylums and being unable to get out. I mean you can understand why people find that absolutely terrifying and haunting as a prospect, can't you? And I think there's an aspect to the Woman in White which perhaps it's easy to miss as you get caught up in the story, the fact that it's a crusading novel that Collins wants things to change and that running through it this stuff about the powerlessness of women and the way that the legal system works against them and whatnot. I mean, that's very much there, I think. Yeah, it it definitely is. Because it's essentially a case against the lunacy laws and the married woman's property Act, which essentially made women kind of civilly dead upon their marriage. You know, they lost all of their rights to their husband. And as you can see in the book, the legal machinery of Victorian society, it fails to protect Laura from the machinations of Sir Percival Glyde, her husband. So it kind of highlights the flaws within the law, the kind of ponderous, heavy nature of it, and and how dependent it is on class and power. And the other interesting thing is that the book implies that true justice can only be served through kind of the gathering of private evidence and personal repro retribution. I mean it's not vigilantes, but it's basically through building a case privately oneself. So in this, Walter and Marion they bypass conventional channels. They try them at first, they try to contact lawyers, etcet,era but it doesn't work . So they conduct their own investigation using kind of amateur methods of detection, essentially. Yes. They set themselves up as private detectives and as adventurers. And they sort of take the law into their own hands to some extent, without giving the the game away. Neither Sir Percival nor Count Fosco are conventionally punished by the authorities or by the legal system. They are, you know, massive spoiler alert, but not this won't be a surprise to anybody that the the the goodies kind of win, but they they win by unconventional adventurous means, which is more exciting I suppose, than it would be if they just won in the courts, but it suggests that the courts are not fit for purpose and that they don't protect women . And you know, there's a sort of class imbalance that runs through the book, isn't there? The the one reason that Sir Percival is able to get away with his his plan is that various housekeepers and servants and maids and doctors and things, they defer to him because they think you know he's posh is to the manor born. Now actually, as we will see, there is a sort of twist there. There is a twist. Interesting because novels of this kind were aimed at a middle class audience, Collins himself is middle class, and the middle class characters tend to be sturdy and decent. And actually when you meet the upper class characters, they're suspect and corrupt. Count Fosco and Sir Percival, aren't they? Yeah, that's definitely true. But I think one of the most striking elements of the book, it's not even kind of its portrayal of kind of class and justice. It's the way that Wilkie Collins handles the female characters. And this is an age when, you know, Victorians idealize the family unit, you know, the role of the wife and the mother. It's very you know divided. You know, moral historians often see this as a kind of a moral reaction to um industrialization, but you have very clearly defined domestic spheres. So men dominate kind of the public spheres of work and finance and politics, and then behind closed doors, you have um the wife, and they're supposed to be kind of selfless, moderate, chaste, motherly, obedient, all of these things. You know, Laura is a very kind of classical Victorian woman in this sense. Yes. Um was kind of known as the angel in the house at this time. You know, Countess Fosco is kind of broken to the will of her husband. She's nothing but kind of an obedient kind of zombie. She's a tool, isn't she? Yeah, she's a zombie. Laura is is punished for disobeying her husband's expect ations . And you know, you even see in the latter half of the novel when Walter is working with the two sisters, Walter is the one that does the digging out in the world, whereas you know, Marion stays at home and and keeps house. I guess Collins reflects that in the portrait of the two principal female characters, the complexities of women's position and his own attitudes towards that. Don't you think? So Laura is the idealised Victorian wife. She is pretty and she is compliant and she is you know good natured. There's no edge to her whatsoever. Would it be fair to say, Tabby, that she's really boring ? Yeah, I thought it was kind of interesting. So the first description of her when Walter first, you know, encounters her and kind of struck by love, she's described as a fair, delicate girl in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketchbook, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes. So it's like she's like a blank slate of a romantic heroine. Her hair is so faint and pale a brown, it's not flaxen yet almost as light, not golden, yet almost as gl as glossy. There's nothing kind of definitive or you know fleshy or stark about her. She's almost like the mirage of a woman. And then you compare that to the descriptions of Marion, who is in actual fact the star of this book. You know, we've said she 's transgressive. She is a woman barely defined by her gender. She is constantly attributed with the virtues of a man. She becomes kind of the detective of the novel. She goes to these great lengths, brave lengths to save her sister, as we said, you know, lurking outside in the rain to eavesdrop, bribing a nurse to free uh Laura from from the madhouse. She and she is a remarkable I was kept thinking this. She's a remarkable creation by Victorian man. And there's this just brilliant, I mean it's cruel but brilliant first description of her. So Walter walks into this uh drawing room or whatever and sees her from afar and struck by the beauty of her figure and her elegance and her grace, but she has her back to him. And the one thing to bear in mind, you know, as I read this, is that it is a very interesting, kind of colourful description, contrast that with kind of the wateriness of Laura's description, as I said to myself with a sense of surprise, which words fail me to express, The lady is ugly. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw, prominent piercing, resolute brown eyes, and thick coal black hair growing unusually low down on her forehead. And yet, her expression , bright, frank, and intelligent, appeared while she was silent to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, blah blah blah. But the minute she speaks, she comes across as kind of beautiful and attractive. Uh her her dark face lighting up with a smile and softening and growing womanly the moment she began to speak. So interesting, you know? It's so vibrant a description. But also, I mean very ungallant. So Walter, she comes closer and he's like, oh no, the lady is ugly. And the business about the moustache, and then she's got a very low brow with all this dark hair and whatnot. Um I mean it is odd. I don't know what's going on there with Wilkie Collins. It's it's so unusual that somebody will create this heroine who is so intrepid, so um I think he's playing with genders. He's, you know, testing the limits of what a woman can be in literature at this time. Yeah. You know, she's such a brilliant character. And I all and I kept thinking when I was reading it, it's like I kept thinking, you know, we only know what Walter tells us, but I think there are times when he's describing his interactions with the two sisters that he sort of gives himself away. It's almost like he's attracted to Marion. Oh, in spite of himself. Yes, Marion is by far the more magnetic of the two female characters. And Count Fosco's obsessed with her. He thinks she's a remarkable person. Count Fosco is basically in love with her himself. I mean, he says multiple times what an amazing woman she is. And um you're right. I mean it's interesting we only s we see her first, it's the male gaze, cla you know . We see her through Walter's eyes. Walter sees her first purely in terms of physicality. Physicality, exactly. He's shocked. And he basically writes her off when he sees the mustache. But then when she starts to speak, he says, Oh, she is actually, you know, she s she becomes womanly and whatnot. He allows her to like speak for herself as well. He allows himself to have his initial, you know, prejudice, you know, shaken and and recarled But the tragedy is that the end of the book Yeah, when her adventures are over. Her adventures are over and she's pushed back into the kind of domestic space and she's gonna have to become And she says this remarkable thing for the time, or rather Wilkie Collins puts these remarkable words into her mouth. She says, No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men, they are the enemies of our innocence and our peace. They drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship. They take us body and soul to themselves and fasten our lives to theirs as they chain up a dog in his kennel. And she's talking there about how the minute that women are married they kind of belong to their husbands, they lose their freedom. And I thought that you know that's an amazing thing to say for a book written by a man at this time. So let us give this a mark. We always like to mark using a different scale. Tabby, what is today's scale? Well, I had something else in mind, but Dominic, as the Count Fosco of this podcast, you insisted upon rating it out of fruit tarts. I thought white dresses was too obvious. So how many fruit tar ts would you give it out of ten? I'm gonna give it eight. And uh I would I think in and of itself as a thriller, it's clearly a ten. It's a foundational work in the thriller adventure genre in the kind of mystery genre. And Collins invents the sensation novel with this bo ok. Uh he captures so many interesting things that are going on in Victorian England. So in that respect it's a ten . But that's all it is, I would say. So compared with some of the other books that we have done and that we are doing, I think it's perhaps intellectually and stylistically a little unambitious. I mean I do know he does the stuff with the different narrat ors, but I think it c it's one of a book that does what it says on the tin. And if you were to give this to somebody who's really interested in fine writing. They might say, Well, it's fine, you know, it's great, it's good fun, but is it any more than that? Also, the truth of the matter is that our hero and heroine, uh Walter and Laura, are a bit boring, and that Mar ion is the star of the show. But it's a shame that the two characters that Collins holds up as the sort of the lovely romantic couple are quite as dull as they are, so that's why I'm deduct ing knocking it back down to an eight. What about you, Tebby? Uh I'm also going to give it an eight. I'm deducting two points for the pretty much the same reasons as you because I think that Laura's a bit of a drip. Right. Walter's just a bit of an everyman. there And's this portion in the middle where the housekeeper's narrating the story and I thought that thought that kind of lagged a bit. But on the whole, it's just it's it's just so much fun. It's great. Like it's a pleasure to read. It's a real pleasure to read. It's often amusing. It's a genuine page turner. I was I was thrilled and shocked by kind of each stage of the kind of discovery of what's going on underneath the surface. You're right, I don't think you kind of has the depth or kind of the um pointedness one of Dickens' books. Or the skill and mastery. But it's it's much more fun, I think. Yeah. But great. What do we have coming up? So next week uh we are doing something much darker actually. We are doing Tony Morrison's uh great book, Beloved. Uh then the week after that we're doing another you know all-time classic really really,. Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Modernist Book, The Great Book of the 1920s. A complete change of tone next after that. Uh Suzanne Carl . The Hunger Games, which I've never read, and Dominic has volunteered as tribute. Well, I'm looking forward to it because I've never read it. And I know some people generally aged about 10 think it's brilliant. We've got Oscar Wilde, the portrait of Dorian Grey, we've got PG Woodhouse, The Code of the Worcesters, Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, George R R Martin, Game of Thrones, and Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willow. So that's loads of reading for people to get on with. And some of this is in response to your brilliant suggestions. So please keep the suggestions coming in. Yeah. I know there's loads more, loads of people have said they want the leopard or they want the road or or all these kinds of things and I promise they will all come. So all right Tabby um I'll let you get off to uh reading beloved. Bye bye. Bye