Secrets and mysteries abound in this classic Victorian thriller. Even the scatter of foreshadowing of impending gloom did not seem to take away from the thrill of slowly and leisurely uncovering the layers of truth the story offers. A collection of narratives in epistolary form, explain the puzzling appearance and the later disappearance of Anne Catherick, the woman in white, and her important role in the future life of Laura Fairlie, a woman who also just happens to look like her. Laura's half-sister, Marian Halcombe proves to be a very brave and persistent sleuth, a trait that even captivates the villain Count Fosco. Walter Hartwright, Laura's drawing teacher who later falls in love with her, is equally unyielding and determined to clear her good name. A very enjoyable book.
'This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.'(opening line)
'There in the middle of the broad, bright high-road -- there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven -- stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.'(47)
'At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books.'(79)
'Yes, my hardly earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again -- why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before -- why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life?'(90)
'The foreboding of some undiscoverable danger lying hid from us all in the darkness of the future was strong on me. The doubt whether I was not linked already to a chain of events which even my approaching departure from Cumberland would be powerless to snap asunder -- the doubt whether we any of us saw the end as the end would really be -- gathered more and more darkly over my mind. Poignant as it was, the sense of suffering caused by the miserable end of my brief, presumptuous love seemed to be blunted and deadened by the still stronger sense of something obscurely impending, something invisibly threatening, that Time was holding over our heads.'(101)
'When a sensible woman has a serious question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer, it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has something to conceal.'(163)
'There are many varieties of sharp practitioners in this world, but I think the hardest of all to deal with are the men who overreach you under the disguise of inveterate good-humour.'(175)
'Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace -- they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship -- they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?'(203)
'The unsolved mystery in connection with this unhappy woman is now rendered doubly suspicious, in my eyes, by the absolute conviction which I feel, that the clue to it has been hidden by Sir Percival from the most intimate friend he has in the world... There are many kinds of curiosity, I know -- but there is no misinterpreting the curiosity of blank surprise: if I ever saw it in my life I saw it in the Count's face.'(262)
'Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.'(278)
'Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and much harm they do us.'(281)
'Any woman who is sure of her own wits is a match at any time for a man who is not sure of his own temper.'(332)
'That sublime self-forgetfulness of women, which yields so much and asks so little, turned all her thoughts from herself to me.'(565)
a Penguin Book Edition
646 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: Victorian Challenge
100+ Reading Challenge
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