The Woman in White
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.
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2010–2026years
44% recommend56% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- My Dickens is pretty lacking as well; I vaguely remember not liking A Tale of Two Cities in high school. Bleak House is probably the one on my list. I did read and enjoy the two obvious Wilkie Collins novels (Moonstone and Woman in White) and have also seen the latter in what I think is an underrated musical. I've heard rather mixed things and haven't tried other works.
- I was going to say that it might not even have been the telegraph as mail was delivered multiple times a day in London at one point. So even letter delivery was pretty quick as long as the distance wasn't too great.
But, in this case, you're right. I searched the text and it was indeed telegrams that were being sent.
The Moonstone stands up pretty well. The Woman in White is pretty good too. I haven't read his other books although I'm told they fall off from those two.
- A thousand times yes to Trollope, and I think there are a lot of nineteenth-century novelists who are like that (not quite as well known as the biggest names, but absolutely superb). Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White) is another good example from that category.
- Exactly! This is a discussion from the 19th century, if not earlier -- just read The Woman in White (or watch the recent excellent BBC adaptation).
- The Hyperion Cantos is a masterpiece which every scifi fan ought to have read, but I would like to recommend a lesser known title of Simmons for readers who have read at least some works of Charles Dickens (self-explanatory) and Wilkie Collins (such as The Woman in White or The Moonstone).
Simmons wrote Drood (2009), which takes these two classical authors and places them in a mystery novel. What struck me as particularly masterful is that Simmons managed to write his prose in such a way that as a reader you soon forget that this book was not written in the 1800s — his tone and style match that of Dickens and Collins so convincingly.
- Related to Dickens and Collins: anyone who's read works by Dickens (who hasn't) and Collins (usually The Moonstone or The Woman in White) and would enjoy a fictional exploration of their relationship in a somewhat darker, rather macabre setting with Wilkie Collins as an unreliable (opium addicted) narrator might consider reading Dan Simmons' Drood (2009). I had the pleasure of reading it earlier this year.
While the premise is odd, Simmons succeeded in creating a work where it is easy to forget that he is not (by far) a contemporary of Dickens and Collins; his style and narrative in Drood are eerily close to how Collins (and his contemporaries) wrote.
Most readers will know Simmons from his lauded Hyperion Cantos. Drood though, is something else entirely, but impressive nonetheless.
