SOURCE: “A Man's Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 392-402.

In the following essay, Perkins and Donaghy examine the subtle critique of Victorian gender conventions in The Woman in White.

The unsuspecting reader of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White¹ may well be tempted to dismiss the novel as little more than a meticulously-plotted melodrama. Certainly, Collins' Victorian critics focussed almost exclusively on the novel's entertainment value.² Influenced by these earlier critics, many twentieth-century scholars have persistently regarded Collins as a lightweight novelist. Lately, some studies have attacked these assumptions about Collins and have begun to recognize his genuine desire to expose the inequities of Victorian gender and social conventions.³ Yet even those who argue that Collins is more than a shadow of Dickens conclude that his novels ultimately back away from the serious...