The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is a LibriVox recording of the novel, placed in the public domain and read by Tim Bulkeley of BigBible.org. What a listener gets is the book itself. Each track starts with the LibriVox notice, names the novel and the reader, announces its epoch and chapter, and then gives way to Collins. The titles handle navigation: 01 – The First Epoch – Walter Hartright: Introduction – IV comes first, and later tracks cover ranges such as V – VII or a single chapter such as XIII. The opening pages are presented as 'the story begun by Walter Hartright,' teacher of drawing, a phrase that marks his account as the start of something larger. Its first line states the stakes plainly: 'This is the story of what a woman's patience can endure, and what a man's resolution can achieve.' There is comedy too. A character named Pesca gives an excitable account of dealing with a 'golden barbarian of a papa' who wants testimonials for Pesca's friend. Then the tone turns. A man in a passing chaise calls down to a policeman to stop a woman in white. Asked what she has done, he answers that she has escaped from his asylum. At Limmeridge House in Cumberland, Hartright meets Miss Halcombe, who lays out the household's routine in a bantering rush. He also meets the former governess Mrs. Vesey, described as possessed of all the cardinal virtues and counting for nothing. One evening Miss Fairlie wears plain white muslin while the others wear silver grey and primrose yellow, and Hartright cannot shake a sense of something wanting. Miss Halcombe later tells him what he calls 'the bitter, the necessary, the unexpected truth.' The foreboding thickens through the Cumberland chapters: surf sounding across the moorland, a lonely churchyard, a watch kept on the white cross over Mrs. Fairlie's grave. There Anne Catherick is found cleaning the inscription, and when Hartright mentions the men who were hunting her she turns to him with a blank look of terror. One track credits a second reader, Ezra, with Anne Catherick's part. The family lawyer, Mr. Gilmore, florid and neatly dressed, stays on to hear Sir Percival Glyde's explanation. If the marriage goes ahead, Gilmore will draw up the settlement that binds Miss Fairlie to it. The sixth track ends on a farewell and on the words that close Hartright's narrative. Anyone who wants Collins's own sentences rather than a summary of them can take the book a few chapters at a time and resume partway through an epoch.