Woman in White (Wilkie Collins, 1860)

General Notes

Renumber from bantam to Oxford ed

• 9 "We don't want genius in this country, unless it is accompanied by respectability" (Pesca's client when P recommends Walter
• 20 Walter "mechanically" walking - that word keeps recurring
  • 40 "dim mechanical drawing"
• 39 "How can I describe her [Ms Fairlie]? How can I separate her from my own sensations, and from all that has happened in the later time?"
  • interestinng that the narrator feels the need to decouple description from affect (given his rather cruel description of Mrs Vesey earlier), and the repeated pressure of "later time" and later narrative on the "narrative present": both a device for foreshadowing and for suggesting the contingency of the narrative
• 64 "ordinary rules of evidence" (which WH doesn't have to connect Glyde to the WiW): as in Audley an undercurrent of what counts as evidence
• 71 boys at the school think they've seen a ghost

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• 144 the legal situation of Laura's life interest and property when married is something of a textual crux - before the Married Women's Property Act 1882, her property would pass to her husband on marriage. Cf. Important Victorian Legislation
• 149-52 details the arrangement of the Fairlies' estate