Collins is not unjustifiably unintelligible, the titled villains of the story must have been unjustifiably stupid.”

In an article on sensation fiction for Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1862), the prolific popular novelist Margaret Oliphant (author of one sensation novel, Salem Chapel, 1863, and herself not overmuch a Collins fan) bemoaned the particular stresses, the “violent stimulant,” of weekly serial publication—as opposed to the heretofore more typical monthly installment, in which her own more respectable novels appeared. Such pressure to produce stimulating cliffhangers week after week, in a “frequent recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident,” she wrote, would sow the seeds of corruption in English readers and ultimately bring about the decay of the national literature (the English literary establishment at the time criticized French novels for their reliance on scandalous scenes to maintain reader interest, a practice judged to be immoral). Oliphant also feared that countless less talented imitators would soon spring up and adopt Collins’s style. Many less skilled writers did attempt to imitate The Woman in White’s narrative strategies and plot devices, with varying degrees of success. Sensation novelists with talent, however, such as Collins’s contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon, also placed The Woman in White atop their list of influences. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) was perhaps the second most popular Victorian sensation novel after The Woman in White; in her best-seller Braddon introduces an influential and often imitated type of female villain, in this case a pretty blonde bigamist who abandons her child, murders one of her husbands, and contemplates killing off the second for good measure.

Despite her many complaints, Oliphant rhapsodizes strangely over the one invariably praised character from The Woman in White: Count Fosco. She emphatically notes, “There is no resisting the charm of his good nature.... To put such a man so diabolically in the wrong seems a mistake somehow.” Most reviewers agreed with her and found the Count irresistible and by far the most ingenious, compelling figure in the novel. As such, he has often borne comparison to the admirable antihero Lucifer in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Fosco seems to have hypnotized Oliphant just as he exercises his powers of mind control over his wife: “We cannot understand how Hartright, or any other man, finds it in his heart to execute justice upon so hearty, genial, and exhilarating a companion,” she writes, and, most oddly, “Count Fosco becomes rather an ill-used personage than otherwise.” Have we been reading the same book? He bears a “certain cheerful consideration for the feelings of his victims,” Oliphant apologizes, yet Fosco’s concern stems in large part from the rebuffed sexual attraction he feels for one of them, Marian Halcombe.

Collins claimed that Fosco was modeled on no particular historical or fictional person, but the Count is in keeping with a long line of Continental villains in the English novel, and his Italianness is illustrated with stereotypical ethnic activities, such as opera singing, concertina playing, and participation in organized crime (in this case, espionage). Collins said of his miscreant, “I thought the crime too ingenious for an English villain, so I pitched upon a foreigner.” Collins based this depiction, he said, on observations of foreign people gleaned during his many years of travel and residency abroad, yet from these same foreign quarters he naturally received many letters accusing him of, in his own accommodating words, “gross personal caricature or rather too accurate portraiture.” As most traditional villains—even Italian ones—were generally wraith thin, their obsessive criminal tendencies and vindictive lusts having eaten away the very sinews of their bodies, Collins by contrast decided to make his main villain fat. Many reviewers found Fosco’s obesity, along with his curious physical desires—his childish sweet tooth and his tactile fondness for his odd personal menagerie—a masterstroke of characterization. As Oliphant swoons: “He is more real, more genuine, more Italian even [italics hers], in his fatness and size, in his love of pets and pastry, than the whole array of conventional Italian villains, elegant and subtle, whom we are accustomed to meet in literature.”

We have as Fosco’s polar opposite in effectiveness our unnaturally patient heroine, Laura Fairlie. Walter’s first besotted description of his lovely charge begins with a very peculiar emphasis on her facial features and the small ways in which they deviate from an aesthetically ideal feminine visage. Walter adores them anyway, but curiously he invites us to fill what he implies is Laura’s blankness (which thereafter becomes institutionalized in the plot) with our own memories of our first great love. Supplant Laura’s traits with the eyes, the voice, the footfall of your own first beloved, he tells us, and “take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine” (p. 52). Why the need for such a strategy? Rather than bring us closer to this character’s presence, it serves to distance us from her at the very moment of her introduction. This is followed immediately by a criticism (a rather valid one, as the rest of the book displays): There was “another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to me the idea of something wanting.... The impression was always strongest, in the most contradictory manner, when she looked at me; or, in other words, when I was most conscious of the harmony and charm of her face, and yet, at the same time, most troubled by the sense of an incompleteness which it was impossible to discover” (p. 52). He senses but cannot name this deficiency. For Laura, of course, the incompleteness rests in her lack of control over her own destiny; for the reader, however, it lies in a partial development of character, a lack of volition, a lifeless complicity to play the pawn in others’ plans for her, no matter what they may be.

Collins seems to phone in Laura as a ready-made victim entirely subject to her tumultuous emotions and the whims of others, and as such a construct is therefore all she can be. The author never allows her to speak for herself with a retrospective narrative of her own—neither she nor her husband bear this responsibility, and they are perhaps the least complex characters in the novel. They are also the most physically attractive, and, like portraits on display, they are only spoken about by other people. Laura’s narrative marginalization continues even to the description of her death. The account itself is buried within a completely deceptive string of text, itself a masterful case study in unreliable narration. Although this is appropriate given that Laura is not actually the person dying, having an illiterate cook, a stranger, relate the shocking story of Laura’s demise is very sly of Collins. Laura, as Oliphant observes, loses the sympathy—and, I would argue, the respect—of the reader after the very first scenes in which she appears. Her trauma registers as so believable, however, that she seems almost too fragile even to criticize, and we hesitate to disparage her.