Books by and for independent women

Marian Halcombe from The Woman in White

“I said to myself, the lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps –and said to myself, the lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express – the lady is ugly!” - The Woman in White

Victorian novels with poor, plain heroines are nothing unusual, but it’s rare to find one who is downright ugly. Then again, Marian Halcombe, the heroine of Wilkie Collins’ sensation novel The Woman in White, cares very little for social convention.

In 1860, when even the first wave of feminism was yet to hit, Marian refuses to be content with a life that limits her to “patience, petticoats and propriety”.

She knows that in a world where a woman is her husband’s legal property, marriage was not the happy ending for women of her era that convention claimed:

“No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women…they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”

She has a point – the novel revolves around a rather melodramatic plot by the sinister Sir Percival Glyde and the fiendish Count Fosco to gain control over the considerable fortune of Laura Fairlie, Marian’s angelic half-sister, and the attempts of both Marian and Walter Hartright, Laura’s equally poor would-be suitor, to rescue her from an abusive marriage.

Our first glimpse of her is through Walter’s eyes, and the description is hardly intended to be flattering – she’s sporting a bit of a ‘tache, and he finds her pallor unattractively “swarthy” (Laura’s later reference to “Gypsy skin” suggests that Marian is of mixed heritage).

But before feminist readers have time to draw an outraged breath, Marian proceeds to launch into a five-page monologue that establishes her as one of the most sparkling creations in the whole of literature. Ever.

Although Walter is the overall narrator and inexplicably believes himself to be the hero of the hour, all the risks and major discoveries are made by Marian. It is her diaries that provide a large portion of the narrative, and her quick thinking that saves her sister from a grisly fate.

In addition, she can beat any man at billiards, she’s a bit of an intellectual goddess, and she singlehandedly runs the entire household. On the downside, she’s a bit of a snob and prone to making rather rash decisions like taking off most of her clothes, climbing onto the roof and then doing a bit of eavesdropping.

She is driven by her near-obsessive love for Laura and whilst their relationship is emotionally complex, it is never cloying or mawkish – instead it is intense, co-dependent and rather more passionate than their sibling bond should allow.

Their closeness is such that Laura’s one act of assertiveness in the entire novel is to insist that Marian’s constant presence in her life be written into her marriage contract, and Laura extracts a promise from her that she “will not be fond of anybody but [her]”.

When the wedding night approaches, it is Marian who explains what Laura is to expect: “The simple illusions of her girlhood are gone; and my hand has stripped them off. Better mine than his – that’s all my consolation – better mine than his.” Steamy stuff for 1860.

But neither her implied queerness or her supposed ugliness stopped countless readers writing to Collins asking if Marian was based on a real woman, and if said woman happened to be single.

Even the evil (and married) Count Fosco is taken with her, although he seems to be more attracted to her as a potential partner in crime as a candidate for a mistress.

Whilst Marian may lack the ethereal beauty of her sister, critic Nina Auerbach describes her as “a truly sexy woman”, noting that she is in fact the embodiment of androgynous pre-Raphaelite sensuality.

The end of the novel has drawn criticism from feminist readers – the plucky, independent heroine is now content to stay at home and help her sister and brother-in-law raise a family in true domestic bliss.

However, true to the spirit of their multilayered relationship, Marian is less Laura’s unpaid babysitter than a co-parent, still threatening the bonds of hetero happiness long after the supposedly happy ending has occurred.

In a world that presented marriage and motherhood as the only options, Marian rejects what Adrienne Rich would later describe as “compulsory heterosexuality” in favour of life as the devoted partner of another woman.

She is an amateur detective, early feminist and, despite her vulnerable position, refuses to be a damsel in distress. She was a groundbreaking character when she first appeared, and even 150 years later she remains one of the most memorable characters in Victorian literature.

Kaite Welsh

(Image from the 1997 adaptation starring Tara Fitzgerald)