Collins W.

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. 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 becomes embroiled in 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.

The Woman in White

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Phoebe

Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs Versey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

'I have heard,' she said, 'and I believe it, that the fondest and truest of all affections is the affection which a woman ought to bear to her husband. When our engagement began, that affection was mine to give, if I could, and yours to win, if you could. Will you pardon me, and spare me, Sir Percival, if I acknowledge that it is not so any longer?'

Jemima Scott

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.

My heart could take her no closer to me, or I should have loved her then as I had never loved her yet.

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.

It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone.

I shrank then—shrink still—from invading the innermost sanctuary of her heart, and laying it open to others, as I have laid open my own.

“Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace—

He was big enough to carry typhus by the ton, and to dye the very carpet he walked on with scarlet fever.

Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?

The Woman in White quotes

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