The Woman in White

⚖The case for it

Marian Halcombe is the reason the book works: plain by her own account, physically fearless, and considerably more use than the man narrating around her, which readers call “one of the most interesting and fascinating women” in Victorian fiction. Count Fosco is the other, courtly and enormous and given to petting his white mice, with “taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison,” funny and frightening inside the same scene. Each account is set down as testimony for a case, so you weigh the versions like a juror. The roadside encounter that opens it decides most readers on the spot. “No page is wasted.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The middle is “too much middle where the story just doesn’t go anywhere,” a hundred-plus pages where suspicion stands in for plot, and serialisation bloated it further into a book readers call “too bloody long and overwritten.” Laura Fairlie is pretty, rich and pitiable with no interior life, and never narrates. Walter is bland to the point of priggishness, patronising Marian in scene after scene, so “Walter is an ass” recurs. The founding coincidence asks a lot. And after all that build, one reader found the reveal “so ridiculously anti-climactic that I actually laughed.”

— the honest librarian

11h

honest hours

16

sittings