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Feb 12, 2016talltimt rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
I have finally gotten around to “The Woman in White,” which is considered one of the earliest detective novels and which has been sitting on my to-be-read shelf (shelves!) for years. It is very much in the style of Charles Dickens; and Wilkie Collins was a contemporary and friend of Dickens, who published it first, in serial form, in one of his periodicals. Although there is clearly the element of detection, it’s just as much a “period piece.” I found it generally sensational and melodramatic but can recommend it to those who, like me, have “always wanted to read it.” My favorite passage is actually rather comic: “Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life. Sat in the house . . . sat in the garden . . . sat in unexpected window-seats in passages . . . sat (on a camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out walking . . . sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything, before she answered Yes, or No . . . A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had actually been alive since the hour of her birth. . . . Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind.”