Why doesn’t Laura tell her own story?

Abstract

Abstract The Woman in White opens with Walter Hartright’s startlingly original declaration of how the subsequent narrative will be laid out: As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them. (p. 5) Wilkie Collins’s reportage style of narration was to be central in the evolution of the ‘Sensation Novel’, and its influence can still be felt as far afield as contemporary docufiction. The Woman in White is, in terms of its narrative technique, one of the most innovative novels of the nineteenth century.