Contemporary Reviews, Adaptations, and Imitations
August 4, 1860 – The Literary Gazette
The Woman in White
In a recent number of the “Cornhill Magazine,” Mr. Thackeray treated humorously the idea of an order of merit for literary men, and spoke of the bickerings and jealousies it would give rise to; and, indeed, in the department of novel-writing alone, there are so many grades, and such a variety of claims to consideration, as would put the constituted authorities at their wits’ end.[1] There is a great genius, who bursts like a comet upon the literary world, and whose every new work is an “excitement,” impatiently awaited and seized with avidity; there is the author who has missed the first rank, but whose writings come to us like oases in the wild desert of modern literature; there is the writer who has not even talent, but who possesses a certain fluency of speech and redundancy of imagination, whose name is perpetually before the eyes of the reader, and who at length is endowed with the title of “popular author;” and there are all varying grades that Mr. Mudie’s walls enclose, from the merely “readable” authors down to the “Lady Evelina Fairstars” of society, who flood the libraries and bore the critics with their amorous toast-and-water maunderings.[2]
Mr. Wilkie Collins, whose new work, “The Woman in White,” is now before us, belongs, we think, to the second of these ranks. His writings are always readable, generally interesting, and sometimes—witness the skipper’s story in the last Christmas number of “All the Year Round,” namely, “The Haunted House”—exceedingly powerful and impressive. He has his own ideas of the object of his profession, and they are sensible and not too lofty; he has rules of his own for the proper practice of his art, and it must be acknowledged that he carries them out well, and that to them are due the unusual curiosity and interest that his last tale has undoubtedly excited during its progress through the pages of “All the Year Round.” Mr. Collins places unusual importance on the strength of his plot. he has more than once expressed his opinion that the chief end of the novelist should be to amuse; and that to construct a story which shall excite the interest of the reader, and to keep his attention fixed from the first page to the last, is a feat worthy of the greatest praise. Those ideas he has worked out in all his writings, and the fame that he has gained will best decide whether he has been successful or not.
We have no intention of giving a detailed account of the plot of “The Woman in White;” it is so intricate, and turns so often upon such trivial points, that we should despair of rendering it correctly; besides that, it would be an injustice to the reader, for either he has read the book, in which case any further account o it here is unnecessary, or he is going to read it, and to give the plot of a book in which some o the plot is everything, would be to rob him of some very pleasant hours.
Of course, the