The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White is absolutely amazing so far (2/3 of the way through).  I've known for a long time that Collins is the "other" Victorian popular writer (he was Dickens's rival), but, although I've read a fair amount of Dickens, I never got round to reading Collins.

I decided to take a chance on it when audible was doing a 3-for-2 deal, and I wanted the other two anyway, and I started this book expecting not to be so impressed, but I was very wrong.  The novel starts out a bit slowly, but within an hour I was hugely enjoying it. First off, Marian Halcombe is one of the best female characters I've run into by a male Victorian writers.  She's more interesting than just about Dickens female, not to mention Henry James's Isabel Archer.  She's funny, opinionated, and bold, and I enjoyed her diary section very much.

Which brings me to the second thing I'm enjoying.  Collins has a different character narrate each section of the novel, each with a different voice -- this is something I expect more out of modernist fiction than the Victorians, and I was pleasantly surprised.  Given a paragraph by any of these characters, one could immediately assign it to the right one.  (Granted, some of them, like the housekeeper are more of a type than a character, but others are really well done).

Third, I'm finding the novel suspenseful, even though it should by rights be pretty creaky stuff by now.  The Woman in White is one of the earliest suspense novels, and the whispered conversations, conniving husband, mysterious foreigner, etc, should are all rather old hat.  And yet...  I found myself wanting to play some sections at double speed so that I could find out the resolution (though I've managed to resist so far).

Of course, the novel has its faults, in particular the villains who are pretty much a type.  Although the villainous Italian count is an interesting enough schemer that he's fun to read about anyway.