And many later critics have suggested that Walter’s affection for Marian is more than brotherly and that the novel’s final domestic sphere—the triumphant cohabitating power trio of Walter, Laura, and Marian—borders on a ménage à trois.

As a typically superior woman, however, Marian disdains other superior women, calling even Queen Elizabeth “highly overrated.” And she seems to be without romantic feeling, almost ensuring the novel’s tragedies by separating Walter from the object of his obsessive passion. Her formidable courage attracts Count Fosco, who suggests certain personal arrangements that Marian finds loathsome and unspeakable. The closest thing she feels to romantic impulse circumscribes her sisterly intimacy with Laura and is presented in nearly sexual terms. Collins excised certain passages from the manuscript that might have brought the suggestion of lesbian erotic devotion to the forefront. Of her sister’s impending marriage, Marian laments in the manuscript, “In less than a month, she will be his Laura instead of mine! [italics hers] The bare thought of it throws my mind into such confusion that I can neither look back nor look forward. I can only ask myself—must the sacrifice be made? Is there no way of escape for us before the twenty-third?”

Passion is a crushing force in The Woman in White. Collins the sensationalist is leagues from being a sentimentalist here; and even though love is delicately expressed, the plot treats it like trash. Insofar as Walter gushes about his feelings for Laura, for most of the book they are simultaneously feelings of misery—extremely accurate ones the reader certainly identifies with, perhaps too much so at times—but misery and love are true partners here, their association spiced with the utter impossibility of romance on all levels. The book’s antiromantic tendencies are nowhere more evident than when Marian, in a fit of decorum she will come to rue, orders Walter not only to leave the Limmeridge estate but to cross an ocean in order to sufficiently escape any temptation to an affair with one of his social superiors. Love ruins Walter’s life for a time, just as the protagonists’ inability to deal with potentially revolutionary unregulated desire ultimately brings about everyone’s unhappiness.

One surprising thing about this novel is that even though its sense of propriety about what can and cannot be spoken and who can or cannot fall in love with whom is very strongly situated in a typically rigid Victorian social and moral context, relatively few details (mentions of specific years aside) would designate to a reader any particular time or place. Essentially, by altering alarmingly few items, The Woman in White could very well be a novel of emotionally constipated characters of almost any period or culture. The emotional burdens under which these characters suffer—particularly those of postponed lovers Laura and Walter—are universal nightmares applicable to sweethearts star-crossed for a variety of reasons. Such feelings ring true even if the context no longer does, and Collins’s manipulative skill at evoking emotions forces us to feel the romantic trauma so deeply. Even if the plot shocks that thrilled the Victorians seem tame by the standards of a modern readership, the emotional components remain strong.

As may be expected from such a popular piece of fiction—the novel has never been out of print—The Woman in White has been adapted numerous times for the stage and film. The first theatrical version was produced without Collins’s consent and appeared only three months after the concluding episode of the novel was printed in All the Year Round. Staged at the Surrey Theatre in Lambeth, it was designed to capitalize quickly on the story’s success; in keeping with the nature of the dramas usually staged at the Surrey—whose name had become synonymous with a sensational, melodramatic style of play—the production emphasized the more astonishing moments of the story and exploited the special effects of stage machinery to create a shocking audience experience. Collins threatened to sue, but he never actually went to court about it. Instead, he wrote his own dramatic adaptation in 1871, one that disturbed audience expectations for the popular tale by toying with the novel’s sequence of events and transporting such classic scenes as the title character’s startling first appearance on the moonlit Hampstead heath to the innocuous Swiss chalet at Limmeridge. Collins also eschewed the shock value of special mechanical effects, further de-sensationalizing his play by having Sir Percival die in the wings and not in a fiery onstage cataclysm.

Reading the script, one cannot ignore the stilted lengths to which Collins went to telegraph pertinent information about his characters that had been developed slowly in the novel. Count Fosco, for example, upon failing to persuade Walter to give him Anne Catherick’s cautionary letter to Laura, proclaims, “A man who can resist the magnetic personal influence which I exercise over my fellow-creatures is a man who piques my curiosity.” Notwithstanding such drawbacks, the production was a success and ran from October 9, 1871, to February 24, 1872, despite additional criticism of the lead actor’s portrayal of the Count (whose Italian accent was unreliable) and the repackaging of the conclusion into Fosco’s abrupt drawing-room assassination by two dagger-wielding intruders as he feeds bonbons to his canaries while packing for his last-minute escape. The iconic poster for the show, created by Fred Walker, features a frightened woman, bundled in white drapery, who looks over her shoulder while she pushes her way through an open door and flees into the night. Its cramped perspective and substantial central figure echo Pre-Raphaelite design, and, fittingly for the visual artist in Collins, it is one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English poster illustration.

The first film versions of The Woman in White were two American silents released in 1912. A longer silent adaptation followed in 1914; titled The Dream Woman, the film was helmed by Alice Guy Blaché, widely recognized as the first female film director. Of the novel’s many later celluloid renditions, the 1948 Warner Bros. adaptation features not only numerous changes to the plot and characters (Marian is made beautiful, for example) but also Sidney Greenstreet—most famous for portraying other nefarious rotund men opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca—as Count Fosco, in one of his final screen appearances. As I write this introduction, Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer of such phenomenally long-lived shows as Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, has just opened a West End musical based on the novel. Rumor has it that Sir Percival’s secret is much darker here and that Anne Catherick is no longer Laura’s exact, although still deranged, double. In contrast to Collins’s own dramatic adaptation, this new production exploits the latest technological stagecraft by using video projections instead of physical set backdrops. British playwright Charlotte Jones bore the difficult task of transforming Collins’s text for the musical, executing necessary functions such as streamlining the plot and deleting some characters (sadly, the Countess Fosco did not make the cut). But she also has addressed potential discrepancies between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century tastes by reducing the number of improbable coincidences and plot twists that Victorian audiences expected and relished. Happily, Jones has also given Laura Fairlie more backbone than Collins had endowed her with. The new, improved Laura perhaps will take a stand next to impatient Marian as the pair attempts to show that, for her deliverance, a woman need not rely only on a man’s resolution.

 

Camille Cauti has a Ph.D.