Perhaps it’s a sign of a
literary mid-life crisis that I’m finally getting around to reading minor
classics that have been on my list for twenty years or so. That, and the ease of downloading classics to
my Nook for a couple of dollars.
Whatever the reason, over the past year I’ve read both The Woman in White and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins – and I
could barely put them down.
What puts Collins on my
minor classic list is that, along with other authors I’ve reviewed, he could
best be classed as a popular rather than a [classic] author. Of all the fruits of his his forty-year
writing career, only the two above-mentioned books are widely read, and only
two others, Armadale and No Name receive much recognition.
Collins was famous – if
not infamous – for his time. He spent
most of his life in liaisons with two women (simultaneously); his penchant for
the sensational led him and his friend, Charles Dickens, into nights of “dissipation”
on the streets of London and in brothels on the continent. The
Moonstone was written under the effects of laudanum, the only drug that
offered him relief from several painful conditions that afflicted him for much
of his adult life. Like the physician Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone, this addiction caused him to suffer from
terrifying hallucinations.
Collins struck up a
friendship with the much older Charles Dickens at the instigation of the
latter. Dickens, it seems, recognized in
Collins the creative drive and attraction to the seamier side of Victorian life
in himself. Dickens nurtured Collins’s
career, publishing his work in his own magazines and helping him negotiate the
publishing business. The two eventually
collaborated on a play, The Frozen Deep,
about a woman’s two suitors flung together on an ill-fated trip to the Arctic
(a plot which it is said gave Dickens the idea for A Tale of Two Cities). However,
Collins’s enormous financial and literary success rubbed his mentor the wrong
way, and when he published The Moonstone, a book that outsold Great Expectations, Dickens testily complained
that “the construction was beyond endurance.”
But to the novels
themselves. The Woman in White has a plot that hinges on stolen identity. It begins with artist Walter Hartright’s
mysterious encounter with a ghostly woman in white on Hampstead Heath. On arriving at his new post in Limmeridge, he
finds that his pupil, Laura Fairlie, bears an uncanny resemblance to this
woman. He finds himself falling in love
with Laura, but she is pledged to Sir Percival Glyde. When Walter flees to South America in hopes
of forgetting his love, Laura is left in the hands of a husband desperate for
money, and who, along with her uncle-in-law, Count Fosco, hatches a terrifying
plan to gain her fortune. Filled with melodrama,
a full cast of conventional and unconventional heroes and villains, and
captivating parallels in plot and character, The Woman in White delivers page after page. And I have to add that Count Fosco is one of
the most repulsive and fascinating villains I have ever come across in
literature.
The Moonstone concerns the theft of the fabulous diamond of the
book’s title. Originally stolen from the
forehead of a statue of an Indian moon-god, the stone arrives, along with a
supposed curse, to England, only to be stolen again on the very night it is
bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. The list of suspects is long, the plot deftly
twisted without ever quite being tied in a knot – and the truth had me guessing
until the end of the novel. The Moonstone is also notable for
perhaps the first developed detective character in a British novel: the
sharp-witted, rose-loving Sergeant Cuff.
Both novels are narrated
in a manner that resembles a dossier on a crime, with each of several
characters giving their story, or evidence.
With no single, controlling narrative voice to assure the reader of
meaning, and no assurance that we are reading the truth from any one character,
we are dragged along in fascinated compulsion to the end.
Like Collins himself, most
of his works have been buried without ceremony.
Yet The Woman in White and the
Moonstone remain as a fitting
monument for the little man who caused such a big sensation in the Victorian literary
world.
