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"The Strange woman spoke first. ‘Is that the road to London?' she said."
F. A. Fraser
Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers
6 ¼ x 4 ⅛ inches (15.8 cm high by 10.5 cm wide)
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, initial illustration, facing p. 13.
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Scanned image by Simon Cooke and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met — the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road — idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like — 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.
I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.
“Is that the road to London?” she said. ["The Story Begun by Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing," Chapter IV, p. 13 in the 1875 volume.]
Fraser deploys a familiar trope of Sixties illustration – opposed figures – to visualize Hartright’s uncanny meeting with the Woman in White. The full moon and ethereal trees add to the sense of Gothic weirdness. Acting as a proleptic sign, the novel's initial illustration creates a sense of anticipation, directing the reader to find in the succesding instalments answers to the questions posed by the strange encounter.
This, then, is the moment which accounts for the title of the novel — but only in part, since Laura Fairlie resembles this first "Woman in White," Anne Catherick, who as it turns out, is Laura's half-sister (since Anne is the illegitimate daughter of Laura's father, Philip Fairlie). The full but pale moon above the figures establishes the nocturnal setting, and the sketched-in vegetation in the background implies the park-like setting, ominously devoid of other walkers at this time of night. The bizarre meeting in the text seems normalized in Fraser's wood-engraving as the young woman, dressed fashionably for an outdoor walk, asks directions. But her matter-of-fact manner is undercut by the handsome Walter Hartright's nervous glance and his tense gesture with his left hand.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (16 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Illustrated by John McLenan. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London: Sampson Low, 1860; rpt. with illustrations by F. A. Fraser and Sir John Gilbert. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.
Created 30 June 2024; last updated 19 September 2024