Oliphant very sensibly wonders how a “pure-minded and ingenuous young woman ... should, when nothing but an effort of will seemed necessary to deliver her from the engagement, voluntarily marry one man while conscious of preferring another.” It is a mystery, she writes, “which the clever mechanist who sets all in motion [Collins] takes no trouble to solve.”

One’s first reading of The Woman in White can be a frustrating experience. Today’s audience—well trained in levels of mystery plotting ranging from the intricacy of Agatha Christie to the relative clumsiness of last night’s syndicated rerun of Law & Order—will likely anticipate a Collins character’s incipient doom long before the character does and will also maintain his or her suspicions long after the characters have abandoned them and dropped their guard. We armchair detectives expect all manner of plot twists and reversals of fortune; when a Collins character sighs with relief and expresses hope in the immediate future or trust in another character who appears to us as less than honest, we often find ourselves rolling our eyes. We wonder aloud, “How could you be so naive?!” Today we simply know the drill: Valuable, cherished advisers are often called away on business or fall ill with alarming predictability; and Laura and Marian’s world becomes increasingly insular, claustrophobic, and unsafe. We are practiced at reading the portents and interpret the ill omens in the Gothic description of Sir Percival’s bleak ancestral estate, Blackwater Park—with its stagnant ponds, abandoned wings, and corpse of a dog—as a foreshadowing of the danger to come and as a hint of its owner’s corruption. Even those characters we think of as intelligent constantly misread situations—Marian suppresses her wariness of Sir Percival and the Count, for example. And when they decide to stop being suspicious because to remain so would be insulting or a breach of etiquette, the reader’s frustration mounts. The lack of critical thinking can be maddening, particularly when those we most expect to exercise it question the very act itself and dismiss the concerns of others; the repeated stupidity grows numbing.

We thus are confronted with people self-paralyzed to act in their own best interest. When Laura begs Marian not to let her think, for example, about any reservations she may have about her imminent marriage, her consequent mindlessness increases her husband’s attraction to her—as it essentially quashes our own. Collins wants to make us angry, however, as we come to realize the singularly alienating position of the married female in society. And once we get past the initial details of plot and secrets and start thinking about what it all means, Collins’s novel truly comes alive. The plot is intricate, if sometimes stilted and predictable; but the relationships between the characters are so finely drawn that even if, as is largely the case, they cannot reveal their true feelings to each other out of a sense of duty, propriety, or shame, we as readers are powerless but to empathize with their pent-up emotions—their affection, their revulsion, their lust. Laura and Walter’s sufferings may touch our hearts at the same time as they irritate us and make us grateful for the social mores of our own time, when, no matter the circumstances, we can usually permit the openness denied to Collins’s protagonists. Walter’s adolescent yearning for his unattainable romantic object is sensually familiar: He lists his ability to smell the perfume of her hair and the fragrance of her breath, his aching proximity to her breasts, the way her hair ribbons tantalizingly brush his cheek in the wind. What drives this text is not only the doom foreshadowed on every page but also the ways in which emotions surge and ebb, playing upon the reader’s heartstrings. We bewail the emotional claustrophobia and repression even more because the internal fire and core of feeling that paradoxically generates them is so easily perceived. The tension between what remains unspoken in the context of the novel’s happenings (and yet is described for the reader in the narrators’ accounts of their feelings) and the social protocol can prove suffocating. Of course, this tension is one of the tremendous pleasures of this text, which, perversely enough, can be fun to read when one is in love, particularly when, like Walter, a thrall to the star-crossed variety.

If many aspects of Collins’s text can frustrate us, intentionally or no, the gender details of The Woman in White remain endlessly fascinating. We have a pair of half-sister opposites: a passive, emotional “heroine” and a masculine spinster, full of a kind of personal resolution but still fundamentally accepting and living within the restrictions Victorian society places on her sex. The duo are not quite medieval damsels in distress, waiting for knight Walter to come and rescue them, but Marian can be permitted to do only so much to help. The title character, Anne Catherick, is a resolute but mentally ill doppelgänger of Laura, childlike and unhealthy. The minor female characters—Mrs. Catherick, a scheming, sinister gold digger, and Countess Fosco, formerly a champion of women’s rights and now a subservient, brainwashed, perpetually cigarette-rolling tool of her controlling, presumably abusive husband—add to the strangeness of the picture. As for the men, we have Walter, the sensitive artist who requires a trip to the dangerous, unexplored jungles of Central America in order to grow the fortitude necessary to return and rescue his dream girl; Sir Percival Glyde, whose slippery, effeminate name undercuts and qualifies his cruelly petulant mien; Uncle Frederick Fairlie, the ineffectual nineteenth-century prototype of The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns; and, finally, Count Fosco, a fleshy voluptuary who loves the feel of white mice crawling on his skin and who falls in love with and propositions manly Marian—perhaps making his lecherous offer as part of a larger strategy to break her stubborn resistance and turn her into yet another mesmerized wife.

If we look deeper into some of these sketches, we can see Collins subverting and complicating what could be considered typical stereotypes. Mannish woman Marian, for example, certainly has some masculine physical traits—a less than feminine handsomeness topped off by her mustache—but her body is repeatedly described as beautiful. According to Collins, hers is the ideal natural female shape, one undeformed by the use of corsetry and other restrictive undergarments, which the author was adamantly against. Collins has been quoted as telling his friend Sarony, the famous portrait photographer, “I too think the back view of a finely formed woman the loveliest view, and her hips the more precious part of that view. The line of beauty in those parts enchants me.” Both Walter and Fosco also find her tempting, and they are not the only ones: Collins received serious letters from male fans of the novel who stated their social position and income, then begged the author to divulge the name of his original inspiration, the real person behind Marian Halcombe, because they intended to propose marriage to her.