ABSTRACT
The Woman in White is the latest, and by many degrees the best work of an author who had already written so many singularly good ones. That mastery in the art of construction for which Mr. Wilkie Collins has long been pre-eminent among living writers of fiction is here exhibited upon the largest, and proportionately, the most difficult scale he has yet attempted. To keep the reader’s attention fairly and equably on the alert throughout a continuous story that fills three volumes of the ordinary novel form, is no common feat; but the author of the Woman in White has done much more than this. Every two of his thousand and odd pages contain as much printed matter as three or four of those to which the majority of Mr. Mudie’s subscribers are most accustomed, and from his first page to his last the interest is progressive, cumulative, and absorbing. If this be true-and it appears to be universally admitted-what becomes of the assertion made by some critics, that it is an interest of mere curiosity which holds the reader so fast and holds him so long? The thing is palpably absurd. Curiosity can do much, but it cannot singly accomplish all that is imputed to it by this theory, for it is impossible that its intensity should be sustained without intermission through so long a flight. If The Woman in White were indeed a protracted puzzle and nothing more, the reader’s attention would often grow languid over its pages; he would be free from the importunate desire that now possesses him to go through every line of it continuously; he would be content to take it up and lay it down at uncertain intervals, or be strongly tempted to skip to the end and find out the secret at once, without more tedious hunting through labyrinths devisedonly to retard his search, and not worth exploring for their own sake. But he yields to no such temptation, for the secret which is so wonderfully well kept to the end of the third volume is not the be-all and end-all of his interest in the story. Even Mr. Wilkie Collins himself, with all his constructive skill, would be at fault if he attempted to build an elaborate story on so narrow a basiswitness his tale of The Dead Secret, which is in some degree chargeable with this defect of construction, and therefore with a corresponding measure of prolixity. The strength and symmetry of the tale before us are marred by no such organic defect. Here the secret underlies, indeed, the whole tenour of the story, and its vital connexion with it is often more or less strongly surmised; but it is only at intervals that it is brought prominently into notice, and that direct efforts for its discovery become the sole business of the moment. Meanwhile there is other matter in hand sufficiently copious and exciting to keep the reader’s mind perpetually occupied with a flow of varying emotions.
