I didn't know anything about this book when I started listening to it, other than it came highly recommended, and that it was pretty long. There was one brief period, about midpoint in Marian Halcombe's narration, when the story started to get on my nerves and I found myself whispering "Get ON with it." But almost exactly at that point, the stakes were suddenly raised from financial risk to life and death, and from that point on the story grabbed hold and wouldn't let go till the last T was crossed. Bombastic and ridiculous, with more than a touch of Hector P Valenti, Star of Stage and Screen, Fosco is underneath all that a genuinely frightening and dangerous man. But this is, after all, a Victorian novel, and one mustn't upset the apple cart, must one? There are some wonderful villains here as well, especially the scintillating Count Fosco. My only real regret is that Walter Hartright (get it? Hart Right?) didn't realize at some point that the devoted and courageous Marian was a much better match for him than the passive Laura. Some chapters are taken from diaries others from correspondence others were specifically requested from the participants (at least in terms of the story world) to fill out the narrative. Like "The Moonstone" itself, and like a handful of other Victorian novels ("Dracula" comes to mind), "The Woman in White" alternates between various narrators, each filling in a piece of the puzzle. Only two readers are named in the blurb, but there are actually several people in the cast. But tastes change: the ending of "The Moonstone" now seems contrived in an Agatha Christie-ish kind of way, and the powerful brooding atmosphere of this book trumps it in spades. I'd read "The Moonstone" in high school and couldn't imagine anything as interesting. Read it for the female doubling central plot device alone - a rare feature in the writing of men about women.I skipped this one for many years. Possibly Wilkie Collins' most famous novel, The Woman In White remade the Gothic Horror novel by taking its characters and tropes and setting them in commonplace surroundings among "people like us", Featuring unforgettable characters such as the incomparable Count Fosco and the redoubtable Marion Halcombe (a woman for whom male Victorian readers politely inquired of Wilkie the address as they wanted to marry her), The Woman In White with its compassionate treatment of those suffering mental distress ought to be credited with having put the cause of mental health care a hundred years ahead - had not Jane Eyre with its madwoman in the attic been generally credited with the reverse. Download cover art Download CD case insert The Woman in White - version 2
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