The Birth of Mystery

Strange sometimes when you get a new perspective on something that you think you are familiar with.

I first read The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins many years ago, but I have recently read it a couple of times thanks to audible.

A habit I have fallen into recently is looking things up on Wikipedia, whenever something occurs to me and for which some clarification might be helpful.

It is helpful to have a constantly available resource for answering simple questions of fact as they arise.

Whatever we might say or think about the usefulness or otherwise of information available through this kind of source I have found it to be almost always both accurate and informative.

Where once upon a time we may have had to struggle with several weighty volumes, now we can just Google it.

I don't think I fully appreciated the significance of this novel until I read a short Wikipedia entry that made it clear that this novel was perhaps the first in its genre.

An inspiration to the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and let's face it, we all love to read a mystery, taxing or otherwise.

The woman in White is on occasion incredibly old-fashioned, which is another way of saying that it is an anthropological insight into the way that society worked around the middle of the 19th century.

It reveals the sensitivity of the times with social position and the lengths that someone will go to for the sake of their place in society, and of course we so take for granted the advances that have been made in such things as how women can be independent and strong that on occasions it seems quite extraordinary that behaviour may have been tempered so differently by circumstances.

History is famously a subject that we are not very good at engendering, but as someone once famously said we must know our history so that we do not make the same mistakes again.

There is much about the world within which The Woman In White is set that does not fit with our modern world view, but it is a journey of insightful splendour, and a great reminder of how far we have travelled.

The author does not digress as much as someone like Victor Hugo, writing at a similar time in France, and something that I love about Hugos' digressions is that they throw a different kind of light upon those things that the author is interested in, whether it be Parisien street slang or the tendency for a people to rebel against society.

There is so much more between the lines, and perhaps it is the benefit of hindsight that enables so much more to be seen within the literature of our predecessors.