51. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

One night in the mid-1850s, Wilkie Collins, his brother Charles, and John Millais were out walking. Millais’s son later wrote:

It was a beautiful moonlight night in the summer time, and as the three friends walked along chatting gaily together, they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from the garden of a villa close at hand. It was evidently the cry of a woman in distress and while pausing to consider what they should do, the iron gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than to run in their direction, and, on coming up to the three young men, she paused for a moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, suddenly seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on and vanished in the shadows cast upon the road.

The woman fled and Collins pursued her. When he persuaded her to halt he learned that her name was Caroline Graves, and that she had been imprisoned at the villa under the mesmeric influence of an unnamed suburbanite. One thing led to another (often the case in the nineteenth century in regard to mysterious fleeing women in diaphanous clothing), and she became Collins’s lover. The episode was later plundered by Collins in his novel The Woman in White, which stands at the forefront of the nineteenth century ‘novel of sensation’, in the meeting between Walter Hartwright and Anne Catherick:

I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met [...] when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road - there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven - stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

The theory that Caroline Graves was the original Woman in White is still contentious, if not frankly disbelieved by many critics. Millais’s son’s account was written forty years after the events, after all. But it received support in the 1930s from Kate Perugini, Wilkie’s sister-in-law and Dickens’s daughter.

Consulted:
Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White (ed. and introduction Scott Brewster, 1993)
Watt, George: The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-century English Novel (1984)

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