A review by jackslynn
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

3.0

First half of the book gets 4 stars, second half gets 2. And that's being generous. I was able to ignore Collins' dismissive attitude towards the courage and strength of women for awhile, but by page 400 I was done. Our main female characters are a woman who is portrayed as intelligent and strong but is regularly apologizing for being a woman. Oh, she's also ugly. Because to Collins you can't be strong and pretty. You have to have a mustache to balance it out. Our second character, Miss Fairlie, is so completely worthless and pitiful that I hoped she would die. I swear she spent half the book in a faint or feeling the vapors. But she was pretty and everyone loved her. She had the intellect of a small child so it makes perfect sense that Marian and Walter were treat her as such. I love to read the classics so I have great patience for the differences in generational sensibilities but this was beyond aggravating.