13. The Woman In White: Victorians, Sensation, and Scandal

along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London.

I had mechanically turned in this latter direction and was strolling along the lonely high road, idly wandering, I remember what the cumballand young ladies would look like. When in one moment every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop, by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me, I turned on the instant with my fingers tightening around the handle of my stick, there in the middle of the broad

bright high road, there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven, stood the figure of a solitary woman. Dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent engraving query on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me in the dead of night and in that lonely place to ask what she wanted.

“The strange woman spoke first. Is that the road to London?”

So what are chilling seeing that is, it's an unforgettable moment from Wilkie Collins's brilliant novel The Woman In White, which was written and published in 1860. This is the ultimate

Victorian thriller, but it's also one of the first examples, I suppose you can call it a very

early example in some way of detective fiction and the supreme example of what the Victorian is called the sensation novel. So we are in the heart of Victorian England in the book, but beneath the surface of kind of ordinary domestic middle-class life, all kinds of horrors and terrors are poised to strike. And as we turn the pages of The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins uses multiple different narrators to unfold this mystery story of mistaken

identity and all kinds of legal entanglement, female courage, madness, which is a great theme of

“the book and this sort of forbidden romance. So Tabby, The Woman In White, I think it was your”

idea to do it. It's an absolute killer, isn't it? And you've read it before, haven't you? I have, yeah, I read it as a teenager, as with so many of these kind of classic novels. But I do remember thinking that portions of it slightly dried, certain narrators slightly dried and will explain that concept in a bit, but I absolutely loved one of the heroines of the novel, Marion, who will be describing in due course. But yeah, this time around, I couldn't put it down

basically. It's a total page, Turner. I couldn't agree more, so actually I'd read it.

Also as a teenager, reread it at the weekend, and I was absolutely gripped by it, even though I knew what was coming. I think Wilkie Collins, it's extraordinary that somebody who was writing so, you know, more than a century ago, still has the power to get you to turn the pages. I mean, a couple of his cliffhangers are as exciting as any cliffhanger you'll find in any work of modern fiction. There's a sense of tension that drives the whole thing. And you know, when you're

reading it, you completely escape into his world. I'll produce a Nicole and I will talk about this yesterday. It's just such good fun, all of it. It's thrilling and it's good fun. And actually, a moment, I thought, so funny. Completely. It's a rare thing that you would say, because often I think when people read Victorian books, they read them slightly due to flee. You sort of think, well, this will be good for me. This will be very wholesome and improving and worthy and whatnot.

I mean, Wilkie Collins' books at the time were definitely not seen by his contemporaries as worthy and improving. They were seen as shockingly sexy and violent and scary and whatnot. The romanticie of their day. The romanticie of their day and they actually, they still have that power, I think. I think it's still, they're still quite sexy and shocking and exciting and

“and all of this. And actually, here's the thing. What's so fascinating about the woman in white”

is not just the book itself, but the stories behind the story. So all the inspirations on which Collins drew, the real life cases of people who had been locked up in the silence, or had escaped from legal entanglement, or, you know, had been drawn into these nefarious schemes and whatnot. I mean, these are fascinating stories in and of themselves, actually. Definitely. But the way that the book is structured and the way that it's written is also

quite interesting and massively builds the suspense, because it's unfolded by multiple narrators and, you know, sometimes in letters, sometimes it's diary entries, there is no kind of omniscient narrator to ground us or root us or give us a sense of reassurance the whole time.

and it's kind of left to the reader to work out what's going on. And Collins himself actually trained as a lawyer, so you can see that in the way that this is written. Yeah, completely. And the different voices come from different parts of society, don't they? So there's men and women. There are very high status people, but then there are housekeepers and servants and things who are kind of giving their testimony and you're sort of sifting the evidence the whole time.

So it demands something of you as a reader in a very fun and immersive way. You're judging whether you can trust narrators and, you know, you're piecing together the story as you read.

“Now talking about piecing together the story, we have to be careful with this book. I think in”

particular to avoid too many spoilers. Yes. Because I know there will be some listeners who haven't read it and who hopefully will be inspired to read it by our episode. So we will try to find line. We will obviously have to give some things away, but we'll try not to ruin the book

completely and not to give you too much, I guess, from the second half or certainly the last third

of the book. Those are have absolutely no interest in reading it. Well, there's a lot here for you too. Yeah, that's true. So we start, don't we, with Walter Hartwright. And he is a drawing master, a drawing teacher. And I suppose in some ways he's quite a bland character. You know, so he's our initial narrator. What can you say about him? He's an upstanding decent Victorian young man, isn't he? Yeah. Is there anything more than that to him? Do you think Tabi?

No, I mean not especially. I think he, you know, he's, as you say, he's decent. He's brave. The one, the one interesting thing is, once you get into your mind, the possibility that maybe you can't trust or he tells you the reader, he comes into a slightly different light. You know,

you start to wonder if maybe he's feelings aren't always for the person who's meant to have

feelings for. You start to wonder how many of the good things or the decent deeds that he does, he actually does do. So that makes him slightly more interesting. But yes, on the whole, he's just kind of an upstanding Victorian hero. Yeah. So he is walking back from his mother's house in hamstered Heath. And this is the opening reading that you and I read, Dominic, so just brilliantly. And he's accosted by this frightened and nervous woman dressed all in white. And he knows that she's

running from something. She's fleeing something. And she begins to kind of speak critically about some powerful man who has wronged her. Anyway, Walter helps her on her way to London. And then another carriage draws up to tell him that a woman matching her description has escaped from a lunatic asylum. Yes. Walter then travels the next day to Limeridge House in Cumberland to become a teacher, a drawing teacher for these two young women. But, you know,

this, this encounter with a woman in white stays with him. And there, he meets the two ladies and question, this is Marion Holcomb and Laura Therley and they are her sisters. They're very different. Marion is kind of plain and quite swore thee. She is funny and very bright and very curious. You know, the minute that Walter confides in her about having had this encounter, she starts digging into it and almost becoming a detective. By contrast, her half sister Laura is pretty pale and

jealous. Maybe not as interesting as her sister. But Laura crucially is very, very wealthy. She's

“an Ares, which Marion is not. Yes. So we're talking about these two characters because I think”

so much of the book and your response to the book depends upon the relationship of these two characters, Marion and Laura these half sisters. Just one quick observation. That scene where he meets the woman in white is what the time was one of, you know, it was seen by contemporaries as one of the the most memorable, the most exciting scenes in all English literature. And actually,

I think it kind of still is. I think it's an amazing moment when you're turning the pages,

you're just a few pages into the book and there's this, it's a brilliant conceit that the guys walking and then there's a woman dressed all in white who seems distracted and clearly has escaped from a lunatic asylum and wants to know the way to London. And it sticks in your mind as it sticks in, Walter's. Totally. But I mean, because I live quite near Hampstead Heath. So I walked there sometimes and so I was imagining, having an encounter like that with kind of dusk drawing in.

Yeah. Totally chilling. It is brilliant. So anyway, they're he's gone off to Cumberland to teach these two half sisters. They also have a terrible uncle, don't they? Yeah. called Mr. Fairly, Frederick Fairly. He'll find a mentally entertaining, I have to say. And he's an absolutely terrible man because he's a massive hypercontract. He's quite funny. I mean, it's the scenes with him are quite funny because he's a sort of, he's a bit of a caricature.

At one point, he describes himself as a bundle of nerves dressed up as a man. Yeah.

“And he's incredibly selfish, narcissistic. You have to whisper when you are with him because he's”

better talking normal volume. Yeah. He's bad for his nerves. Yeah. He's quite, um, he's quite

But actually Charles Dons plays him in the TV, the BBC TV adaptation of this book, very, very

“well. Charles Dons plays him. I can't imagine that, actually. Yeah, but very well. He's just an absolute”

amoeba of a man. He's got no backbone whatsoever. Yeah. And then, so you would think, well, the, what, what does the woman in white got to do with all these characters? Is she more of like a spectral kind of mirage? Is she more of like a symbol? But no, she's a character in her own right.

So she is a character called Anne Katharic, who basically, as a little girl, it turns out,

she had been brought to Limeridge. And she knew Laura and Marion's mother. So she was connected with the family, wasn't she? Yeah, exactly. And she developed a real attachment to their mother, because her mother was, was very distant and take very good care of her. And she's, she's almost quite simple. Right. Anne Katharic, which is why she fixates on dressing in white, because Marion and Laura's mother once said to her that little girl's like, "pretty is to kind of

meet us in white." And ever since then, she's refused to dress in anything else. But then, you know, the first real kind of point of jeopardy comes in, because Laura, receives a letter, who we, from, we later discover Anne Katharic, warning her not to marry the man that she has been engaged to for a long time. And this is, surpassable glide. And it had been the dying wish of her father that she married him, even though he's kind of twice her age.

And so she's been engaged in for a long time. But then she gets this letter, and that obviously makes her wary. But then there's another thing, she and Walter Hartwright inevitably have started to develop feelings for each other. So upon discovering that she's engaged, he leaves. Walter, he's so decent. He goes, "Well, he goes to Honduras." That is very Victorian somehow. It is, he does the decent thing. He goes away,

because he knows she's engaged to this aristocrats, the person will glide.

If you love her, let her go. Exactly, exactly. And basically, even though she loves

Walter, and even though she's had this letter telling her not to marry a person, Laura, because she's very beautiful and very Victorian. Things where Laura have to marry him anyway, and she does. And so she marries Supercival, who actually, we know from the beginning, is a kind of bad man, don't we? Because he, when he arrives at the house, he pretends to be very polite and courteous and friendly. But Walter Collins writes it in such a way that it's blinding

the obvious that this is just a front, and then actually he's a terrible crook. Yeah, and she makes it a big deal about the fact that he's kind of his good looks have gone to seed. Yeah. And that's something that we should be wary of. Yeah, the thing that gives him a way, surely, is the fact that he's losing his hair. Yeah. Because that's pointed out again and again. I found that a little bit too like that.

I've always told you to be very suspect, Dominic. Thanks to everyone's impressions,

I'm glad you've got that. Here we have a bad seed. Anyway, yeah. Finally, eventually, despite everyone's misgivings, Laura does marry Supercival Glyte. And they go on this honeymoon. And then they come back and they move into Supercival Glytes kind of a state. And this is a very kind of dark and gloomy place called Blackwater Park. And Marian goes to

“live with him too. But they're also in residence, a two other very important characters. And this is”

Count Fosco. He's a good friend of Supercival Glyte. And he's married to Madam Fosco, a very malevolent character. And she is Laura's aunt. And so by virtue of the fact that Laura is inheriting this fast fortune, she is not. So she's losing out on a lot of money. Thanks to Laura. And Dominic tells us a bit about Count Fosco because he is such an iconic character. He's very camp. He's one of the supreme Victorian villains and Count Fosco. He's an amusing villain,

though. He's brilliant. He's enormously fat. He's constantly eating fruit tarts and sort of stroking mice. And he has pets. I don't know. Canary's and cockatoo's or whatever they are. And he's very courteous in a sort of very over the top Italian way. But then you realize quite quickly that he is a malevolent and kind of calculating customer. And he is basically manipulating Supercival Glyde. So that they're encouraged these two characters. And you can tell quite early on.

“I think you worry for Laura and her fortune. And indeed her sister Marion.”

But there's this terrible sense of entrapment as well at Blackwater Park. And the powerlessness of these two women face to like the system and these two men because all of their efforts, basically there's just at one point it's a personal try to get Laura to sign something to sign away a large pot of her fortune to him. And she resists all of Marion's efforts to write these letters to their lawyers in London to kind of get help and kind of free them from this dilemma. You know,

and they talk to, you know, Laura's lady in waiting to kind of make sure that she doesn't go

“and spread the word of their situation. You know, it's really throttling.”

Yes, exactly. There's a suffocating atmosphere that the two sisters realize there's nothing they can do. They are basically the mercy of these two guys. Supercival who is drinking more and more and clearly has run out of money and is basically it becomes very very obvious that his married Laura for her money and he's determined to get his hands on it one way or another. And then

Count Fosco who you can't have an argument with him because he's always performatively very

polite and courteous. But there's a sort of coldness in his eyes and behind his smile that as he eats another fruit art, he is plotting your downfall. Exactly. And also, you know, tickling white mice. He has a real thing for white mice for birds, for parrots and for fruit tarts. Yes. So this makes me extremely malevolent. He's the one that the two sisters start to really fear because they know that he's got some real brains behind that sort of

florid plump face. Exactly. Then we have the reappearance of the woman in white because and Catholic appears to warn the sisters once more. And she lets slip that Supercival has some great secret that if it were shared with the public at large, he would be basically destroyed and brought down. I mean, let's not give that away because that's, you know, when you're reading the book.

“Oh, you want to find out. You want to find out. What is Supercival secret that could destroy him?”

And can the two can these two young women find it and use it against them? But there is another dark secret, isn't there? Yeah, there is. So there's there are many, many twists. Marion tries to she tries to spy on Persevern of Fosco in this fantastic fantastic scene. Where she's so

in trepid, Marion, she climbs out to the window. She's basically on a kind of terrace in the pouring

rain, Eve's dropping, you know, very sort of like James Bond or something. Yeah. And she then catches a chill because she's been Eve's dropping on Count Fosco and Supercival while they've been unveiling their plans. She falls ill and is basically stuck in a different bit of the house. And that means the Laura, her sort of pretty sister is totally at their mercy and they're able then to pull off their, they're really, really sinister scheme against Laura on the huge spoiler alert here. Yeah.

So what they do is they recapture and catholic who it turns out is already dying. She has a heart condition and then they trick Laura into going to London where she thinks Marion is and when she arrives there, they drug her and when she wakes up, she essentially wakes up in a lunatic asylum because what they've done is they have swapped her identity with Anne Catharix. So they have said that Laura has died, Lady Glide has died, they put Anne Catharix in her coffin, Barry her in her grave next

to her mother. Meanwhile, Laura is trapped in this asylum and you know, being told that she is Anne Catharix. So this allows, to say, my wife has died, he can claim all her inheritance and her estate and more not. And meanwhile, Paul Laura is totally, you know, she is powerless. She's in the asylum and when she says, "I'm actually Laura fairly," or Laura Glide, as she now is, there's sort of water saying, "No, you're not your Anne Catharix, you've got mad." And she can't get out, there's no way

she can get out. Well, or is that? Or is that? Because Marion is so entrepid that basically Marion is able to rescue Laura, isn't she? She's able to go to the asylum and bribe, she bribes one of the... She bribes the nurse to get um Laura free. Anyway, then they team up with Walter, who's back in England and you upon visiting Laura's grave, heart broken. Oh, what a great scene this is. Seize the two sisters veil. Amazing scene. And as I, oh my god,

“she's alive. This is one of the great moments in English fiction, I think. When Walter goes to the”

grave and he sees that the woman he fell in love with has died and then he looks up and there's two failed women, who are they and one of them is her, he can't believe it. And they kind of team up to try to bring down account fosco and surpassable Gide by discovering and exposing his secret,

which we will not be revealing, but we will be revealing some other crucial information

after the break. We will. So, um, obviously this is a, it's a complicated story, but it's a thrilling story and it's actually worth pausing to say if it's thrilling for us, imagine how much more melodramatic it would have seemed to the Victorians. And it's the product of the genius of one man, Wilkie Collins, but it's also a product of the obsessions of the Victorian period. So, maybe it's how we will start with a man himself. Yes. Wilkie Collins, tell us a little bit about

Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins is born in Marlabel in London on the 8th of January 1824. He's the eldest son of the eminent landscape artist, William Collins, who actually served as

boy and they go traveling around Europe and he says that during that time, you know, living in Italy

“and France, he learned more than he ever did at school. Then he returned to England and went to”

a boarding school, which he loved, very Victorian, somehow, you know, faintly Nicholas Nickelbee. And he, apparently, allegedly started telling stories because he was bullied and in order to kind of regal out of the clutches of this school bully or distract him, he would tell him stories. You know, he wrote, "It was this brute who first awakened in me, he's poor little victim,

a power of which but for him I might never have been aware." No way, that's a good story.

He was, he was an odd-looking chap. He was born with a large bulge on the right side of his forehead. He was only a five foot six and he had a disproportionately large head and large shoulders, but very small feet and hands because of kind of this thing on his head. He was forced to glass from a young age and his eyesight really suffered in later life. And he had quite a kind of unconventional, but he, me and lifestyle, you know, he famously loved good food and wine.

He dressed very flamboyingly and he spent much of his time traveling abroad, which he loved. He leaves school. He is a princess to a tea merchant. That doesn't really work out. He starts writing. He trains as a barrister, but he never really practices law. So although the legal training plays a part in the way he structures this book,

he's actually never really been a lawyer. Oh, although he's interested in it,

he makes his money from journalism and he starts contributing to literary journals.

“And this is when he meets Dickens. So Charles Dickens is by far the most important influence on”

Wilkie Collins and they're very, very close on they. So clearly Dickens has a massive influence on him in a literary sense. So serialization, cliffhangers, a sort of melodramatic plot, all of this kind of thing, and Count Fosco, for example, this sort of white mice and freak tart fancy Italian villain, he's quite a Dickensian character in that he's larger than life. He's melodramatic. He's extravagant all of this. Yeah, and also Dickensian characters often have

these kind of minute details. They have certain traits or characteristics or habits. But actually, when I was reading at this time, I kept thinking about Bleak House. And so yeah, you can definitely definitely see the parallels. Yes, so Dickens and Collins were travel together and through Dick in, see becomes pals with lots of writers, and artists, and as Dickens he keeps giving him kind of breaks to write for his literary magazines and things. Now, there are a couple of things

about Wilkie Collins that are kind of clues to the nature and the interest of this book.

First of all, you've already mentioned this with his bulging head. He has very poor health.

So he's constantly got gout and headaches and boils and all of this kind of thing. He takes various remedies, so Turkish baths. There's electric baths, have you ever had an electric bath? No, there's an electric bath. Sounds lovely. No, his bonkers. Yeah, you'd sit under a machine that basically zaps you as static electricity. So what would stand up on end? I bet I'd come out of it, glory. Well, apparently Benjamin Franklin was a big believer in this. Good looking man.

People were still doing electric baths until the end of the 19th century, and then doctors said, this isn't sane. Like, why are you doing this? This is not making it better at all. So there's electric baths. Collins was hypnotized. He took lots of quinine, but above all, his big thing was Lordenum, which is a mixture of opium and alcohol. And in those days, you could get Lordenum over the chemist's counter. It was sold as, for example, mother bales, quieting syrup. And Collins's

doctor said to him, take this, basically, this opium and alcohol mixture for your gown. He took so much of it that he became completely addicted. He would have this, it's a hallucinogen. So he would have these visions that he was being, I love this detail. This is from Matthew Sweet, a friend of mine, wrote a brilliant essay about the woman in white, which is the introduction to the penguin classic sedition. And he points out in this that Collins had these visions where

“outquote a monstrous green woman who sprouted a pair of tusks. Oh my God. That's what happens”

if you take too much Lordenum. A surgeon told what Adina wants told, well, he can't instead you're taking so much Lordenum that basically you're taking enough Lordenum every day to kill everybody at this table. Oh my God. Because basically he developed a resistance to it. Yeah. And, you know, that sort of sense of reality slipping out of control, your health is on the verge of collapse at any moment. That runs all the way through his fiction, not just the one

in white, but all his other sensation novels. It definitely does. And then the other thing is his personal life. So tell us about his personal life because I know you know about this. Yeah. So he had two main relationships throughout his life, two women. He married neither of them. The first was a woman called Caroline Graves who was a widow with a young daughter and he lived with her for the best part of 30 years. She claimed that she was the daughter of a gentleman and that her husband

short-hand writer from a family of stone racers. Anyway, she and her daughter Harriet lived together from 1858 and they had a brief separation when the second woman in Collins's life came onto the scene. But then after that they lived together for most of their life. But this was not

kind of thought proper. It was never something they acknowledged in public. She to the world at

large was seen as a named as his housekeeper. You know, he wouldn't exactly take her to social parties or anything like that. Then the second woman was called Martha Rudd. They met when he was 40 and she was 19. So as we will see later that's something very child's Dickens about that. And he put both of his mistresses in two separate houses a short walk away from each other. And when he was with Martha they pretended to go by Mr and Mrs William Dawson and that's the name

that their three children inherited. So you can see from this, Wilkie Collins is like slightly cynical attitude towards the kind of the Maureys and the morals of Victorian society at large, kind of Victorian establishment with its very proper households. It's you know, patriarchal households,

you know, the married angel and to the kind of hardworking gentleman. And I think you can see that

“in the women in white as well. Yeah, his own life is a sort of reboot to the standards of the”

day. And so to some degree I think almost all of his novels are running counter to the expectations and the conventions of the time, which actually brings us quite nicely to the historical context. So when Victorian Britain in the 1850s, 1860s and as you say tabby, this is the high point to the idealised patriarchal Victorian family set in part by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Yeah, of course. And the idea that the Laura, Laura fairly, the heroine of the book,

is your classic idealised Victorian maiden. She's beautiful. She's polite. Do you to full obedience? Yes, exactly. But Marion, creating Marion, he's created a character that is rebellious. She's transgressive, yeah. Yeah, transgressive, exactly. Now that's not the only interesting thing about the culture of the time, I think. So I mentioned

“Matthew Sweet said, he's brilliant about this because this is I think what his PhD was on was sort of”

sensation fiction and how it related to Victorian culture. And well, he basically says, we get the

Victorian's completely wrong because we think it's all stiff collars and stuff shirts and more nuts. But in fact, they had a massive appetite for novelty and for gadgets and for shocks and excitement that this, the 1850s, was an age of spectacles and freak shows, all kinds of things like panoramas and dioramas and so it tropes that you were going to see at fairs and at carnivals and at sort of great public celebrations. And a lot of these things were designed to manipulate and trick you

and you would get a kind of thrill from finding that you'd be deceived, kind of illusions almost. Yeah. What goes hand in hand with that, this new kind of journalism, because the newspaper stamp tax was repealed in 1856. So people are producing cheaper newspapers, many more of them, and they're competing with each other by telling ever more sensational stories about crimes and scandals and marital disasters and all of these kinds of things. And at the same time, if you're

growing up in the Victorian era, you are reading Penny Dreadfalls, which are cheap stories, sensational stories about highwaymen and adventures and pirates and detectives and all of this. And so what this means is that when Wilkie Collins, when Dickens says to him, "Would you like to write me for my magazine all the year round?" I'd like to write me a really exciting story. The market is there for something that is sensational and shocking. You know, the Victorian's

already wanted. And Collins is the man who's going to supply it. And the woman in white, which is serialized between November 1859 and August 1860, offers Victorian readers a more thrilling and sensational experience than any book that they have ever had before. It's all about tricks and manipulation and madness and twists,

“you know, narrative twists and uncertainty. I think that's such a big part of it, actually.”

There's no, you know, how you would read, I don't know, Jane Austen or George Orgy at all. Wendy Dickens. Yeah. There's usually a narrator who is, you sort of associate with the author. And the narrator is on this, the narrator knows everything. And you are safe in the narrator's hands. Giving you a hint about how to think about the characters. A little bit of a clue. Yes, completely. You don't get that in this. No, you don't know whether to trust

anything that the characters are telling you. Sometimes the characters are telling you things that don't write wrong. So when Frederick Fairly, who's the massive hypercontract, the bundle of nerves pretending to be a person, when he tells you, you know, his version of events, the whole time

And the other thing that Matthew Sweet points out is that, because the characters are telling

“us the story themselves, when these incredibly exciting things happen to them, like they're”

drugged or they're kidnapped or they're tricked or they're terrified in some way, it's so much more immediate and immersive than if there's an array to between your mediating it all. So your, it's as though it's happening to you in real time. And actually he quotes a novelist and

critical of the time for Margaret Olifant, forgotten today, but a huge figure at the time. And she

didn't like sensation fiction. But she said that it felt so much more immediate. So when Walter first meets the woman in white, Mrs. Olifant wrote, "The shock is a sudden as startling as unexpected and as incomprehensible to us as it is to the hero of this tale." Because it feels as though we are all Walter and it is happening to us. They're interestingly, she thought this was terrible. She thought it was too violent, too shocking. I mean, you made the comparison with romanticy last week,

we did a quarter of Thornton roses at me and a lot of people think, oh gosh, that's rubbish, and it's polluting literary tastes and all this. But people thought that's about this fiction. Well, we discussed that. We discussed how kind of every age has its next great kind of sensation novel

that people say is destroying literacy and corrupting people's minds and stuff. It's always the

way. And it's so interesting that now this book, which a lot of people would consider, you know, bit hefty, maybe a bit unwieldy from the outside, maybe a bit intimidating. At the time, this was that. It's so interesting. And we know that people love it, don't we? Because people would talk about it at dinner and stuff. And there are lots of Victorian big wigs who were addicted to it. Yeah, well, I mean, famously William Gladstone, the Prime Minister at the time,

he cancelled a trip to the theater in order to continue reading it, which is just great. I, I so approve of that behavior. So there's merch, isn't there? There's one in there. Yeah, great merch. Perfume, Cloaks, Bonnet, would you wear a woman and white bonnet? No, but I'd like to see you and one. Yeah. Also, interestingly, there was a revival in the name "Walter", which is so interesting. People wanted to copy the hero. So I don't know, maybe it's like if loads of

little boys have been called Harry after the Harry Potter books became massive or something. And then also, which is also excellent, there was a trend for naming cats after Count Fosco.

“I'm gutted, I missed out on that. Where did you recently reveal that you named on your pets?”

Well, no, actually two of them. So I named my dog Zelda. But actually, my brother named my dog Zelda after Zelda Fitzgerald. And I named my cat Seraphina after Seraphina Pecala, from London all the nights. Very literary, menagerie. Not one inch of that insistence upon itself. No, not at all. So effectively, what Wookie Collins has done with this book, the woman in white, is he has invented a literary genre. And I think what he's done is he's taken the

violence and the horror that people associated with older books. So actually, weathering heights,

the very first book that we did in this podcast, is a good example. Weathering heights is like

often seen as the last great Gothic novel. So the Gothic novels that had flourished in the late 18th century, they're all kind of malevolent counts and women being locked up in towers and terrible family secrets. And what Wookie Collins does in the woman in white is he takes all that. And he brings it back to modern England. And he puts it in a world where people are having cakes and they're going on trains. He situates it in a drawing room as well. Yes. Domestic settings.

A bit like we said of Agatha Christie when we were doing our Sherlock Holmes episode. Yes, I think that's a good, I think that's actually a very good comparison. That there are people who are that the setting seems in a way quite humdrum. It's quite banal. You know, Walter is just an ordinary, quite boring Victorian art teacher. And he thinks that nothing exciting will ever happen to him. And all of this stuff, which is so baroque and so bonkers, people being locked up in the silence,

“is happening in the heart of mid-19th century ordinary England. And that's what makes it so thrilling.”

To the chime of the dinner gong or whatever, you know, people are still dressing for dinner, even though after dinner they're being drugged and shoved into asylum. Exactly. And Collins had an expression, he said this was taking place in the secret theater of home. Brilliant. So that even in your kind of middle class home or something, there will be all kinds of madness and secrets and horror and malevolence and more not. And you know, this gave rise to the sensation novel. There were

lots of imitators, so there's a rightful Mary Elizabeth Bradden who wrote a book with lady ordless secret, one of the best selling novels of this period. Actually, another brilliant book, all sorts of poisoning and bigger me and fake deaths and stuff. I'm really recommend it. But nobody did it better than Collins himself, because he did this book, he did no name, he did Armadale. And then the last of the great four books that you wrote in the 1860s was the moonstone

detective fiction. So clues, red herrings, the big reveal at the end. Yeah. The tragedy for

“him, I would say is that he writes loads more after the 1860s. But none of it is as good again,”

because his sort of more crusading preachy side takes over the expense of his entertaining narrative melodramatic side. So his books become a little bit preachy. They're all about

kind of marriage reform and legal reform and things. They're never quite as exciting. And then he

died in 1889, bizarre story actually. Here's a cab accident. He was thrown out of a cab, injured and then he got bronchitis and then he had a stroke and then he died at the age of 65. I mean he'd been in really bad health beforehand, but it's a kind of a shame that he died in such a weird way. Yeah, that was the end of Wilkie Collins. It is really sad actually. I like the thought that he had sort of quite a colorful, exuberant life while it lasted with his two mistresses. But we've only

just kind of scratched the surface of the woman in white and particularly kind of the dark secrets

“behind it. So what the book reveals about the insanity fever haunting 19th century imaginations,”

the sex and violence beneath the surface, but also there are real life inspirations behind the woman in white. There are real cases that inspired the story and we will be delving into those after the break. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goll Hangars, the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by cancer research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, cancer research UK scientists

are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer.

It builds on tracer eggs, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years. To uncover the disease's earliest warning signs, lung vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows

what long-term research makes possible. For more information about cancer research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/therest is science. Welcome back everybody to the book club. Now the woman in white is a mystery novel above all, and we have promised to unveil some of its secrets. Who won't spoil it if you haven't

read it, but we will talk about some of the mysteries behind the book if you like. So first of all,

the identity of the woman in white. I mean, this is a massive thing, isn't it? So in the book quite early on, we know who this is. We know that the woman in white is this woman, and Catholic, who looks just like a hero in Laura Fairly, and who is escaped from a lunatic asylum. But, you know, scholars have spent loads of print arguing about who the woman in white really is, because that undoubtedly were real life examples of women in white as it were,

from whom Wilkie Collins got the idea. And the first possibility is that the woman in white was basically somebody we've already mentioned, which is his lover disguised as his housekeeper, Caroline Graves. You know, it's no coincidence that people talk and talk about this and have

“their different theories of stuff, because I think Collins himself, maybe slightly mythologised”

this in count to himself. So he is said to have had this run in with a mysterious woman in white himself, and that this directly influenced water heart rights encounter, first encounter with Anne Katharic. He was said to have been strolling home one night from a party in 1858 with his brother, and of course the famous painter John Everett Milley, and Milley's son wrote a biography of his life and recorded this encounter in the biography. So he said that their conversation was suddenly

arrested by a piercing scream, which came from a house nearby, before they could decide what to do, the gate swung open, and a woman, young, beautiful woman dressed in white, ran out into the three of them, and she kind of paused in front of them for a moment, terrified, and then suddenly coming to a senses, she raced off again into the shadows, and then Milley is said to have said, what a lovely woman. And then, yeah, jolly good show, yeah. And then Collins is said to have said,

I must find out who she is and run after her, and then the next day when people said or what happened, who was the woman? He was quite quiet about it, it didn't give much away. But he did reveal that

living in a villa in Regent's park, and he had kept her there in prison for many months under threats

and under some kind of mesmeric influence, very gothic that. There's always a maiden trapped in

a castle under the mesmeric influence of some kind of dark antagonist, and then that eventually

“in desperation she'd fled, and that's when she ran into the three young men. And that's how”

his relationship with Caroline started. Yeah, the woman in question was Caroline Graves, and this is said to be how they met and how the relationship of 30 years also started. Do we believe it? I think probably not. I think it's slightly exaggerated. It's super melodramatic. It's full of kind of gothic horror themes. And also, it's likely that he had met Caroline Graves in 1856, so almost two years earlier. But then there's another possibility. Oh, the Henrietta Ward story.

So this is a story told by the painter, Henrietta Ward. She was married to Colin's his great friend Edward Ward, so they're both called Ward, but that's coincidence. And that she got engaged in him at the age of 14, which I think is too young. I think that's not a controversial opinion. And Colin's was visiting them one day, and she said, oh, let me tell you about this

“local woman in Slauke, Mrs. Coffin. Mrs. Coffin apparently would dress in white like a ghost,”

and she'd go around and scare children playing in the cemetery after dark. And Mrs. Ward said later that Colin's walked home all the way across Hampstead Heath, thinking about Mrs. Coffin and that this gave him the idea for the woman in white. And my verdicts on this is it's perfectly possible, but we only have her word for it. Yeah. And actually there are much more interesting

possible sources than Mrs. Coffin. So let's go to the third one, which is a French one.

This is a sort of compilation of scandalous criminal trials in French. The Collins had bought in a bookstore in Paris in 1856. And it was called the Khukkoi, the Kuz Seleb by Maurice Meijon. And Maurice Meijon basically went through all the French court records and he found the most sensational ones. And Collins then bought this book, and he ripped it off, and he wrote magazine articles about the most exciting cases. Yeah. And there was one case in particular that grabbed

his attention and will surely interest listeners who were interested in the woman in white. So it was the story of a French noble woman, called with the excellent name, Adelaide Marie Hoch, Lucignon de Champignel, who was the marquee de duo. Masterful.

And she lived, I'm just showing off. I know. And she lived in the 18th century. And basically,

she inherited the estate and her brother tricked her out of it with the help of one of their female relatives. So the female relative drugged the marquee de duo with some poison snuff. She had the huge headache after taking this snuff, and she passed out. And when she woke up, she found that she was in the salt petriere mental asylum on the outskirts of Paris. And she woke up and she said, "What's going on? I'm the marquee de duo. Let me out."

And the attendant said to her, "No, you're not. You are Madame Blaville. We have been told that you're mad. You think you're the marquee, but you're not." She eventually managed to get out the marquee de duo. And her brother had her arrested as an imposter. I mean, that's extraordinary. It's really doubling down. Yeah.

Basically, all her servants said, "No, no, this is the real person." But her brother got away with it. She died in poverty without ever recovering either her fortune or her own identity. Yeah. And in this account, Meijon mentions that when she was locked up in the asylum,

she was wearing a white dress. So clearly, since we know that Collins read this, we know who's interested in it, this obviously is one of the inspirations for the story of Laura Fairly, swapping our identity involuntarily with Anne Catholic and finding that she has been locked up in a lunatic asylum. But it's not the only one. So there are other stories from England on that.

“Yeah. And this fourth possibility is I think probably one of the most famous, because it was”

very famous in England at the time. And this one, this one is very creepy actually. So this is a woman called Louisa Notic, and she was a wealthy woman from Essex, and she and her four sisters became the followers of Reverend Henry James Prince, who was a revivalist clergyman. He founded this millenarian sect called the Agapemony and the Abode of Love in Somerset. When their father died in 1844, all four sisters inherited a vast sum of money.

charismatic kind of cult leader persuaded three of Louisa's sisters to marry members of his sect so that he could gain control of his vast fortunes. And when it looked as though Louisa might do the same, her mother took drastic action and ordered her son and her son in law to falsely abduct Louisa from her home and imprisoned her in a villa in London. There, when she continued to kind of say insist upon you know, Reverend Prince's divinity and righteousness and all that, her family had her

certified insane, citing religious monomania. I mean, are they the baddest there or are they the

good? You know, I don't know, when I first read this, I was like, oh no, no, no, the family of the

“baddest, you should never ever do that. But I think it's, it's a loose loose on all sides, I'd say.”

Because she's about to give away her fortune to a guy who's clearly a bad man, a cult leader. I get the sense that her family are quite keen on rather than kind of protecting her from a scary cult leader, I think they're quite keen to get her hands on the, on the dough on the money. To be honest, I think if my relative of mine was going to give all our families money to a man who set up something called the Abode of Love. I would have doubtedly. I would have doubtedly have them locked

out for insanity. The title alone would have you taking drastic actions. I'm sorry, you've

lost me with the Abode of Love. Anyway, she was put in a, in a, in more craft house, a silent, wasn't she?

Yeah, very nasty. But she managed to escape in January 1848. She was then recaptured, so very an catharric. And then her story reached the commissioners in lunacy and they ordered her release in

“May 1848. And she successfully sued her family for false imprisonment. And the judge,”

Lord Chief Baron Pollig, famously ruled. You ought to liberate every person who is not dangerous to himself or to others. And this sparked a massive public debate at the time about legal liberties and the medical authority, i.e. making sure people weren't thrown into a silence that proper examinations, but a more than one person kind of decreeing them insane.

Yeah, then well, that's basically it raises the question, you know, what is insanity in all this

kind of thing, which is to be a subject for us to. Yeah, for the first time, actually, because people started to see insanity as rather than kind of like a almost like something that suddenly came upon people that existed in your body, they started to treat it like an illness rather than a moral condition. Yeah, as a moral condition or like a haunting or a possession. Yes, exactly. So, well, the mid-19th century is the time when, you know, people are fascinated

by medicine, they're fatty. I mean, they're like us, they're fascinated by mental health and ill health. And arguing about exactly how you define it in order to this kind of thing. And this undoubtedly did influence the woman in white as well, didn't it? Because we know that Charles Dickens wrote about it at the time, so it seems likely that if Charles Dickens knows about it, he's interested in it and then so would his friend Collins. He was personally interested

it. Yes, well, we'll come onto this. So, I mean, it's a massive scandal. And actually, you mentioned the commissioners in lunacy who are these people whose job it is to decide these kinds of things. So, one of them was a guy called Brian Proctor, who was a medical witness at the trial, at the not-age trial. And actually, the woman in white is dedicated to this guy.

“Yes. So, Collins is clearly fascinated by this issue. And I think that's partly because”

at the precisely the point where he comes up with the idea for the woman in white and is writing it, the issue of lunacy is being hotly debated in all the newspapers. Because there have been these kind of lunacy panics, what historians call lunacy panics, whether it be great scandals about people being locked up against their will for financial gain. And I think there was it four of them in 1858 alone making the National newspaper headlines.

Deliberate attempts to incarcerate people for insanity and it was four people who were saying two men and two women. So, yeah, as you say, this was a huge public outcry around this. And the people that suffered worse when it came to being kind of illegally incarcerated were often Victorian wives who were known to being kind of involuntarily committed to asylum's by kind of incompetent or corrupt doctors, not for their will being, but for the convenience of

their husbands or possibly because there was some kind of fortune at stake. You know, there were kind of used to silence disobedience, what, disobedience wives. I suspect that this too has been slightly mythologised. Well, there's a case, isn't there, that's very well known to Colin himself. So one of his friends or one of his former friends is trying to do this to his own wife.

Because it happened about two years before he wrote the novel. So, this is Rizina Balwa Litton.

She was born in 1802. She was the daughter of a woman's rights advocate and an Anglo-Irish landowner. And then in 1827 she married a very good friend of Wookie Collins's. And this is Edward Balwa Litton, who was a novelist and a politician. And he's the man actually that coined the phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword. And also, it was a dark and stormy night. Yes, and he, yeah, he's a playwright. He was a huge figure, literary figure for the Victorians. They're totally

forgotten today, really. And he wrote a play that both Wookie Collins and Charles Dickens acted in. So they knew him very well. He's married this woman, Rizina, but he's seriously unfaithful and they end up separating and Rizina loses her children.

“Yeah, he takes her children away from her, which I think would enrage any woman.”

Yes. And she wrote an novel, didn't she? Carricoturing her own husband, called Chievely or the Man of Honor? I admire that. 20 years will say go by. And Balwa Litton is standing in a bi-election as a conservative parliamentary candidate. And he's speaking at the hostings. And who should turn up? But his wife, Rizina. You could so see this happening to Boris Johnson, couldn't you? Who loudly denounces him? You know, you're a, you're a rake.

You're a rake? What do you think I was saying? I don't know, you said you're a rake. Right. What should probably thought about? She says you're a terrible man. You're all this that and the other. And he says will your your bonkers? And then he, what do you do? He got two thugs to drag her away and commit her to an asylum in Brentford. So two doctors, John Connelly and

“El Forbes wins low who were very eminent mad doctors as they were called certified her as insane.”

Balwa Litton's bidding. And he got, I felt down a massive rabbit hole the last night reading about this. So he persuaded his, some of his cronies in the press like the time is not to report

them the story, but the daily telegraph could not be bought. And basically led the campaign.

That's the first. And these doctors had to admit that they were, they got it wrong. And that she was actually sane and she was let out again. And Matthew Sweden, his excellent piece about the woman in white says this clearly is, um, is an inspiration. And actually Rizina, when she read the woman in white, she said, oh, this is absolutely brilliant. Because super civil glide like Edward Bolton is past his prime. He's building his bad tempered.

He's locked his wife in a lunatic asylum and Rizina wrote to Collins and said, you know, while he was the book was being serialized and said, I'm loving this. I love this. I'll give you more details. And she said, then the man you're writing about, you're villain, quote, is alive and is constantly under my gaze. In fact, he's my husband. Brilliant. Which wife hasn't thought that at some point or another? Yeah, exactly. Well, so there's one more twist. And this is about Dickens and Tabby,

you found this to me. I did. I did some digging. Well, googling. I don't think it's that. It's an equal sum. I delve deep into the archives of public information. So tell us about Dickens. So obviously Charles Dickens kind of, the greatest celebrity of Victorian period, very good friend of wookie Collins as we've seen. And in 1857 Dickens is middle-aged. He has been married to his wife, Catherine, your kind of ultimate Victorian maidry arc for about 21 years. And at this

“point then, he embarks upon an affair with an 18-year-old actress called Ellen Turnon. It's kept secret”

from the public or as much as possible because he needs to maintain this kind of vision of himself as, you know, a compassionate, respectable family man. But it gossip about it is swirling in kind of literary circles. So finally, he strangers himself from Catherine. And this domestic upheaval inspired this trip that he and wookie Collins went on to Cumberland, which inspired large portions of the women in white. You know, the the train journey, the water heart drive,

takes up there. That's the journey that they took. And he wrote, "I want to escape from myself,

my blackness is inconceivable, indescribable, my misery amazing." Right. So there's one kind of

side story in this that you know, Maeve had a part to play in the book. So during this walking tour, well they come across this hall on the outskirts of Maryport. And it was said to be haunted by a woman in a white dress. And they came across this kind of ghostly legend. And this was a year before Collins, you know, had his encounter with his caroline graves. Yeah, so it's I wonder if that kind of led to him exaggerating that encounter. But more importantly, eight years after Dickens

that her husband had once tried to have a locked up as a mad woman, kind of in the vein of the

“stories that we've been telling. What's the evidence for this? Well, there was a letter written by”

the neighbouring question. And this was discovered a few years ago by this Dickens scholar John Bowen. There was an amongst his massive cash of letters found at Harvard. So in this letter, the neighbour says, Katherine had born her husband, 10 children, and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing. But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity, he could not quite rest it to his purpose. So according to this scholar Bowen,

the plan was halted by the doctor who refused to confirm that Katherine was in fact insane. The doctor, Bowen suggests was this guy Thomas Harrington Tuk, who is a superintendent of

Manor House asylum in Chisic. Tuk was a friend of Dickens, but then they became estranged

around this time. So it all kind of fits. So Dickens has clearly taken inspiration from the stories that he and Collins have been discussing. And he sort of thinks, yeah, she's had ten kids. She's getting on a bit. Maybe I'll just get written on a package. Yeah, I'll lock her up in a mental site. Do you think that's shameful from Dickens if so shameful? The thing is we don't know. It's just based on a story that she's told her neighbor who's there called it to a friend, I suppose.

Exactly. But I suppose not necessarily impossible. So the irony of all this is that at the time when the woman in white came out that some of the critics said, gosh, it's so sensational, it is so shocking, it's so lured and this is debasing the literary tastes of the nation. But the fact is it's just so it's so deeply grounded in the realities and in the concerns of the day. The understandable outcry about these women who are already pretty powerless compared with

their husbands because of property laws at the time and the way that the legal system works. Being locked up against their will in a silence and being unable to get out. I mean, you can understand where people find that absolutely terrifying and haunting as a prospect,

“can't you? And I think there's an aspect to the woman in white, which perhaps it's easy to”

miss as you get caught up in the story. The fact that it's a crusading novel that Collins wants things to change and that's running through it. This stuff about the powerlessness of women in the way that the legal system works against them and whatnot. I mean, that's very much there, I think. Yeah, it definitely is because it's essentially a case against the lunacy laws and the married woman's property act, which essentially made women kind of civilly dead upon their marriage. You know,

they lost all of their rights to their husband. And as you can see in the book, the legal machinery of Victorian society, it fails to protect Laura from the machinations of suprasible glitter husband. So it kind of highlights the flaws within the law, the kind of ponderous, heavy nature of it and and how depended it is on class and power. Yeah. And the other interesting thing is is that the book implies that true justice can only be served through kind of the gathering of of private evidence

and personal retribution. I mean, it's not vigilantees, but it's basically to building a case

privately oneself. So in this, Walter and Marion, they bypass conventional channels, they try them at first, they try to contact lawyers, etc, but it doesn't work. So they conduct their own investigation using kind of amateur methods of detection essentially. Yes, they set themselves up as private detectives and as adventurous and they sort of take the law into their hands to some extent, without giving the game away, neither suppressive or nor count fosco are conventionally punished

by the authorities, or by the legal system. They are, you know, massive spoiler level, not this when we are surprised to anybody that they, the good is kind of win, but they win by unconventional adventurous means, which is more exciting, I suppose, than it would be if they just want in the courts, but it suggests that the courts are not fit for purpose and that they don't protect women. And, you know, there's a sort of class imbalance that runs to the book isn't there,

that there, one reason that's a person who is able to get away with his plan is that various housekeepers and servants and maids and doctors and things, they defer to him because they think, you know, his posh is to the man aboard. Now actually as we will see, there is a sort of twist there. There is twist. That's interesting because novels of this kind were aimed at a middle class audience, Collins himself was a middle class and the middle class characters tend to be sturdy and decent.

And actually when you meet the upper class characters, they're suspect and corrupt.

“Canfosco and suppressable honey. Yeah, that's definitely true, but I think one of the most striking”

elements of the book, it's not even kind of its portrayal of kind of class and justice. It's the way that Wookie Collins handles the female characters. And this is an age when, you know, Victorians idealised the family unit, you know, the role of the wife and the mother,

industrialisation, but you have very clearly defined domestic spheres. So men dominate kind of the public spheres of work and finance and politics. And then behind closed doors, you have the wife and they're supposed to be kind of selfless, moderate, chased, motherly, obedient, all of these things. You know, Laura is a very kind of classical book toy and woman in this sense. Yes, completely. She is what was kind of known as the angel in the house at this time. You know, Countess Fosco is kind of broken

“to the will of her husband. She's nothing but kind of an obedient kind of zombie. The tool, isn't she?”

Yeah, she's a zombie. She's vacant. Laura is punished for disobeying her husband's expectations. And, you know, you even see in the latter half of the novel when Walter is working with the two sisters, Walter is the one that does the digging out in the world. Whereas, you know, Marion stays at home and keeps the house. I guess Colin's reflects that in the portrait of the two principal female characters. The complexities of women's position and his own attitude towards

that. So, you think? So, Laura is the idealised Victorian wife. She is pretty and she is compliant and she is, you know, good nature. There's no edge to her whatsoever. Would it be fair to say,

Tabby, that she's really boring? Yeah, I thought it was kind of interesting. So, the first

description of her and Walter first, you know, encounters her and kind of struck by love. She describes a fair delicate girl and a pretty light dress, tripling with the leaves of a sketchbook,

“while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes. So, it's like she's like a blank”

slate of a romantic heroine. Her hair is so faint and pale, a brown. It's not flaxen yet almost as light, not golden yet almost as glossy. There's nothing kind of definitive or, you know, fleshy or stark about her. She's almost like the mirage of a woman. And then you compare that to the description of Marion, who is in actual fact the star of this book. You know, we've said, she's transgressive. She is a woman barely defined by her gender. She is constantly attributed with the virtues of a man.

She becomes kind of the detective of the novel. She goes to these great lengths, brave lengths to save her sister, as we said, you know, lurking outside in the rain to eavesdrop, bribing a nurse to free Laura from the madhouse. She and she is a remarkable, I was kept thinking this. She's a remarkable creation by Victoria Mann. And there's this just brilliant.

I mean, it's cruel, but brilliant first description of her. So, Walter walks into this drawing

remote ever and sees her from afar and struck by the beauty of her figure and her elegance and her grace, but she has her back to him. And the one thing to bear in mind, you know, as I read this, is that it is a very interesting kind of colorful description contrast that with kind of the wateriness of, of Laura's description. As I said to myself, with a sense of surprise, which words fail me to express. The ladies ugly, the ladies' complexion was almost

sworthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large fur, masculine mouth and jaw, prominent piercing, resolute brown eyes, and thick core black hair growing on usually low down on her forehead. And yet her expression bright, frank, and intelligent appeared, while she was silent to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, blah, blah, blah, but the minute she speaks, she comes across as kind of beautiful

and attractive. Her dark face lighting up with a smile and softening and growing womanly the moment she began to speak. So interesting, you know, it's so vibrant and description. But also, I mean, very unbalanced. So Walter, she comes closer, and he's like, "Oh no, the lady is ugly." And the business about the moustache, and then she's got a very low brow with all this dark hair and whatnot. I mean, it is odd. I don't know what's going on there

with Wokey Collins. It's so unusual that somebody will create this heroine who is so entrepid,

“so daring. I think, playing with genders, he's, you know, testing the limits of what a woman can”

be in literature at this time. You know, she's such a brilliant character, and I kept thinking when I was reading it. It's like, I kept thinking, you know, we only know what Walter tells us, but I think there are times when he's describing his interactions with the two sisters, he started to go for some self-aware. It's almost like he's attracted to Marion. Oh, in front of himself. Yes, Marion is by far the more magnetic of the two female parents.

And can't fosco's obsessed with her. He thinks she's a remarkable person. Can't fosco is basically in love with herself. I mean, he says multiple times,

what an amazing woman she is. And you're right. I mean, it's interesting. We only see her first

it's the male gaze. Exactly. We see her through Walter's eyes. Walter sees her first purely in terms of physicality. Physicality. Exactly. He's shocked. And he basically writes her off when

she she becomes womanly and whatnot. He allows her to like speak for herself as well. He allows

“himself to have his initial, you know, prejudice, you know, shaken and recarced so as this kind of”

glorious, funny, brave woman. Yeah. But the tragedy is that the end of the book. Yeah, when her ventures are over her ventures are over and she's pushed back into the kind of domestic space. And she's going to have to become a victorian woman after all. And she says this remarkable thing for the time or rather will keep colonists puts these remarkable words into her mouth. She says, no man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men, they are the enemies

of our innocence in our peace. They drag us away from our parents, love and our sister's friendship. They take us body and soul to themselves and fasten our lives to theirs as they chain up a dog in his kennel as she's talking of Dara about how the minute that women are married, they kind of belong to their husband, they lose their freedom. And I thought that, you know, that's an amazing thing to say for a book written by a man at this time. So let us give this a

mark. We always like to mark using a different scale. Tabby, what is today's scale? Well,

I had something else in mind, but Dominic, as the Cal Fosco of this podcast, you insisted upon rating you'd had to fruit tarts. I thought white dresses was too obvious. So how many fruit tarts

“would you give it out of ten? I'm going to give it eight. And I would, I think in and of itself,”

as a thriller, it's clearly a ten. It's a foundational work in the thriller adventure genre, and they're kind of mystery genre. And Collins invents the sensation novel with this book. He captures so many interesting things that are going on in Victorian England. So in that respect it's a ten. But that's all it is, I would say. So compared with some of the other books that we have done and that we are doing, I think it's perhaps intellectually and stylistically a little unambitious.

I mean, I do know he does the stuff with the different narrators. But I think it's kind of a book that does what it says on the tin. And if you were to give this to somebody who's already interested in fine writing, they might say, well, it's fine. You know, it's great. It's good fun. But is it any more than that? Also, the truth of the matter is that our hero and heroine are Walter and Laura are a bit boring. And that Marion is the star of the show. But it's a shame that the two characters

that Collins holds up as the sort of the lovely romantic couple are quite as dull as they are.

“So that's why I'm deducting knocking it back down to an eight. What about you, Toby?”

I'm also going to give it an eight. I'm deducting two points for this pretty much the same reasons as you because I think that Laura is a bit of a drape. Right. Walter's just a bit of an every man. And there's this portion in the middle where the housekeepers narrating the story and I thought that thought that kind of lagged a bit. But on the whole it's just it's just so much fun. It's great. It's a pleasure to read. It's a real pleasure to read. It's often amusing.

It's a genuine page-turner. I was thrilled and shocked by kind of each stage of the kind of discovery of what's going on underneath his earth is. You're right. I don't think it kind of has the depth or kind of the pointedness one of Dickens' books or the skill and mastery. But it's much more fun, I think. Yeah. Great. What do we have coming up? So next week, we are doing something much darker, actually. Yeah. We are doing Tony Morrison's Great Book. They love it. Then the week after that,

we're doing another, you know, all-time classic, really. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the Great Modernist book, The Great Book of the 1920s. A complete change of tone next after that.

Susanne. The Hunger Games, which I've never read. Dominic has volunteered as tribute.

Well, I'm looking forward to it because I've never read it. And I know some people, generally aged about 10, think it's brilliant. We've got Oscar Wilde, the Portrait of Dorian Gray, we've got PG Woodhouse, the Code of the Wisters, Louisa May All-Cott, little women. George are Martin, Game of Thrones, and Kenneth Graham, the Wind in the Willow. So that's loads of reading for people to get on with. And some of this is in response to your brilliant suggestions. So please

keep the suggestions coming in. Yeah. I know there's loads more loads of people who said they want the leopard, or they want the road, or all of these kinds of things, and I promise they would all come. So, all right, Toby. I'll let you get off to reading, beloved. Bye. Bye.