A review by ury949
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
2.0
Woof, that was long. I listened to the audio book, but am still amused by the number of times the current narrator said, "I made my note as brief as humanly possible," or, "I did not waste any time in writing the following two lines to convey my instructions." Further amusing were the, "I copy her letter here, word for word, without any revisions," and especially the scene in which the Count writes his narrative, while Walter Hartright observes him pass page after page, "...in the fifties; hundreds..." hour after hour. It was a satisfying summery of the whole book, really, his long-winded, no-details-spared narrative.
What I'm trying to say is, there are a lot of words here, to tell the story of a conspiracy that's kind of disappointing. Disappointing because, as the reader can pull out the obvious courses of action, Sir Percival Glyde was a dim-witted idiot. I guess that's the point.
The book has great characters, but you really have to get over the dated way Marion over and over belittles her and all women's abilities: women naturally cannot draw or do art; had she been a man she'd have knocked him in the face; had she been a man she would have grabbed the finest horse and gone riding at night. This really bugs me; I just couldn't get over how even the strong woman character was just a weak woman and didn't even think differently in her own head, it made me hate the whole book, and I guess I should be aware of that whenever I read books written in the 1800's.
The best part of the whole book and it's only redeeming part was the narrative of Mr. Fairlie - the sickly old man who only wants ever to be left alone in his misery and has zero social skills and huge misgivings of his class and the "intellectually lacking" people, and his opinion of "the youth" - his dialogue made me laugh out loud it was so funny. Every scene with him in it I adored and perhaps one could even just read his short contribution to the story and be entertained. In fact, I kind of wish that is what i'd done, but I stuck with it and am ready to move on to my next book.
What I'm trying to say is, there are a lot of words here, to tell the story of a conspiracy that's kind of disappointing. Disappointing because, as the reader can pull out the obvious courses of action, Sir Percival Glyde was a dim-witted idiot. I guess that's the point.
The book has great characters, but you really have to get over the dated way Marion over and over belittles her and all women's abilities: women naturally cannot draw or do art; had she been a man she'd have knocked him in the face; had she been a man she would have grabbed the finest horse and gone riding at night. This really bugs me; I just couldn't get over how even the strong woman character was just a weak woman and didn't even think differently in her own head, it made me hate the whole book, and I guess I should be aware of that whenever I read books written in the 1800's.
The best part of the whole book and it's only redeeming part was the narrative of Mr. Fairlie - the sickly old man who only wants ever to be left alone in his misery and has zero social skills and huge misgivings of his class and the "intellectually lacking" people, and his opinion of "the youth" - his dialogue made me laugh out loud it was so funny. Every scene with him in it I adored and perhaps one could even just read his short contribution to the story and be entertained. In fact, I kind of wish that is what i'd done, but I stuck with it and am ready to move on to my next book.