The Woman in White

Laura Fairlie is a wealthy young woman who will inherit a fortune when she turns 21 at her next birthday. She is beautiful and beloved by her half-sister, Marian Halcombe, with whom she lives. She is orphaned and has no male relatives except her uncle, Frederick Fairlie, a bachelor who leads a secluded life and takes little interest in the niece who is under his roof and for whom he is responsible.

Laura enjoys drawing, and Walter Hartright is employed to instruct her. The pair form a bond and fall in love, but she is already betrothed to marry Sir Percival Glyde at the wish of her late father. Her sense of duty prevents her from breaking the engagement, and she heeds Marian’s insistence that she break contact with Walter. This sense of honor is also evident in her decision to reveal her attachment to another man to Sir Percival so that he can end their engagement, which he declines to do. Because she is a dutiful young woman, she is easily manipulated and controlled by those around her, from friends who wish her well to others, like Sir Percival, with more mercenary motives.

Early in the novel, Laura is a picture of innocence and self-sacrificing devotion. Following her marriage, she is noticeably transformed, physically and emotionally. She has been disillusioned by the behavior of her new husband but feels an obligation to keep silent about his abuses. In the final part of the novel, she has been stripped of her privilege and her identity as a wealthy woman. What remains is a sweet but passive young woman who must repeatedly be rescued by others. In many ways, Laura is the central character in the novel—all the action takes place to protect or exploit her—but she is relatively underdeveloped as a character, becoming an archetypal damsel in distress and a cipher for other characters’ desires. Her character is thus a vehicle for the novel’s exploration of The Harm of Gender Inequality, as both societal expectations and Laura’s own temperament conspire to strip her of any agency.

Anne Catherick is “the woman in white” of the novel’s title and Laura’s double. They look remarkably alike, and it emerges late in the novel that they are half-sisters. Anne was reportedly a slow learner as a child, and this apparent learning disability worsened as she grew up; Mrs. Fairlie describes her as struggling to absorb information but then tenaciously holding on to seemingly arbitrary facts and ideas. The key example of this is Anne’s devotion to Mrs. Fairlie, who deeply impressed Anne by showing kindness to her. This devotion is outwardly signified by Anne’s obsession with white clothes, which Mrs. Fairlie long ago told her she looked good wearing.

Before the novel begins, Sir Percival has Anne committed to a private psychiatric hospital, but his reasons for doing so are self-serving; he believes she knows of his illegitimacy and criminality. It therefore remains unclear whether Anne has a mental health conditions. She has been treated with cruelty and neglect throughout her life, and the novel describes her in situations of considerable distress. If she appears incoherent or frantic, these are rational responses to her circumstances. Moreover, many other characters display symptoms of mental distress that those around them interpret as the beginning of “madness.” This creates ambiguity around the idea of mental health conditions, suggesting it is part of the human condition rather than a discrete state that some people experience, and others do not.

Anne is certainly vulnerable—socially and temperamentally—and Collins’s depiction of her is compassionate. Like Laura, she has a profound sense of duty and loyalty, which manifests in her desire to protect Laura, the daughter of a woman who was kind to her. This is the central preoccupation of her life and her character. This single-mindedness gives her an almost allegorical role, and she comes to embody The Nature of Justice.

Marian, Laura’s half-sister on their mother’s side, is the novel’s most meticulous and thorough narrator. Her entries are taken from her diary, and consequently, each is dated. She is more conscious of her own biases than any of the other narrators and reflects, for example, on her instinctive dislike of Sir Percival. Other characters narrate their sections of the story without such self-awareness, and their accounts lose credibility as a result. Marian knows she has biases and attempts to redress them.

One of Marian’s central characteristics is her gender nonconformity; she is assertive, logical, and physically brave (as when she climbs the roof to eavesdrop on Fosco and Sir Percival), all traits her society codes as masculine. In fact, her society expects women to accept subservience not only in interpersonal relationships but also in the eyes of the law. This frustrates Marian, who frequently writes in her diary about what she would do if she were a man. For example, when Sir Percival tries to force Laura to sign a document without reading it, Marian imagines that if she were a man, she would fight him. This struggle with her gendered role has outward signifiers, such as Marian’s physical unattractiveness, her refusal to wear a corset, and a “mannish” umbrella that Laura teases her for carrying.

Sir Percival Glyde, Laura’s husband, is one of the novel’s main antagonists. When he is courting Laura, he appears to be an attentive and considerate man and charms many of the people around him; influenced by Sir Percival’s title, neither Gilmore nor Fairlie doubt that he is an honorable man. However, both Sir Percival’s behavior and his status prove to be smokescreens. He is deeply in debt and marries Laura to solve his money worries, and his illegitimacy means he has no claim to his family’s country seat of Blackwater Park, though the estate’s rotten and dismal appearance aptly reflects Percival’s character.

Sir Percival resorts to extreme and violent measures to secure Laura’s fortune and to conceal first his illegitimacy and then the forgery he committed to cover it up. His actions are all motivated by self-preservation; he dies in a fire when he is attempting to destroy incriminating evidence. His consistent secrecy and deception make him an appropriate villain to Walter’s detective-as-hero; Walter reveals what Sir Percival conceals. However, while Sir Percival’s narrative centrality would seem to make him the novel’s primary antagonist, he is eclipsed in force of personality by his friend, Count Fosco, compared to whom Sir Percival appears brutish and rash.