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Black Secrets Cloak Wilkie Collins's Woman in White

© Pamela St. Clair

Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White has been sitting on my bookshelf for some time, taunting me to be read. It's a beefy book (643 pages in the Oxford World's Classics edition), and I wanted to be sure to have plenty of free time in which to enjoy it. With the holidays behind me and the snow fall in front of me, you would think that January's short cold days would be ideal for huddling in bed, happily entrenched in Collins's gothic and engrossing Victorian mystery. However, my husband and I are in the process of relocating from New Haven to Boston. This means that I spent a good deal of January trekking around in complete despair at the paltry selection of apartments available at astronomical prices in the Boston area. I know New Yorkers will balk at my complaints, but if I'm paying over a $1,000.00 a month for a place, I want to either LOVE my apartment or be forking over the large monthly sum for a mortgage, not for rent. So, while I was happily entrenched in Collins's novel, I was not happily ensconced in a warm bed and with a steaming cup of tea at my side. Instead, wherever I went, the novel was wedged in my pocketbook and was read surreptitiously while traveling by train, drinking cappuccinos in Starbucks between Realtors' appointments, or sitting in a cold hotel room bemoaning callused and blistered feet from a day's worth of apartment hunting up and down Boston and its suburbs. Escaping to the pastoral English hillsides and manors became the perfect and much anticipated anecdote to searching for housing in the twenty-first century. (And did the novel bring me luck? I found a beautiful apartment in a Victorian home. Now that's karma.)

To the novel--some background: Collins was a contemporary and good friend of Charles Dickens. As was customary during that period, The Woman in White was first published serially and appeared between 1859 and 1860 in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round. Its popularity was immediate and immense. (The Harry Potter of its day.) According to an article on the University of Alberta website ), the novel "spawned a mini-industry of Woman in White paraphernalia (including Woman in White perfume and the Woman in White dance)." Today, Disney would be peddling Woman in White cartoons, toys, and video games. Published in book form, it sold 1,000 copies the day it was distributed. The next print run, 1,350 copies, sold out in a week. In 1871, Collins transformed the novel into a play, which met with critical success both in England and in the United States. Clearly, the novel hit a Victorian nerve.

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