SPOILER ALERT because I'm sick of whiners leaving me comments.
Wow. This is supposed to be a classic mystery? The Woman in White was one of the most boring books I've ever read, and I've read a LOT of Victorian books. The plot is seriously that a woman marries a man she doesn't want to marry, and he stages her death to collect her fortune. YAWN. Am I supposed to be impressed that she followed through with her word to her father and married Sir Percival, even though she loved Walter? Nothing interesting happens for about 400 pages, something slightly interesting happens, and then nothing happens for another hundred pages. In fact, I'd guessed the end of the book before I was even halfway through.
The premise is that Walter Hartright is collecting information about the events from the people who witnessed them - I guess that is a clever way of writing a book, but there is no real purpose to this. He says it's so that he can have an accurate description of events so that he can prove his wife's true identity.
I don't know how things were back in the 1850's, but I have a very hard time believing that two women are SO IDENTICAL that NO ONE can tell that there was a switch.
Also, Collins's treatment of women is horrible. Laura is constantly fainting and having fits and losing her memory and doing things she doesn't want to do and then weeping about it - "dear me, I'm so helpless!" She's a wet rag, talentless, and boring, and I don't know why Hartright is in love with her. Marian is a much stronger character, but still, she's always saying things like, "I know I'm only a woman, but ..." I seriously thought that Marion would end up with Walter at the end. But, she's not very pretty, and I guess looks are more important than brains.
Seriously, I cannot believe I waded through this boring crap for four weeks. And then, I get to the end and there's a letter that was published in the newspaper about how Collins had his dates wrong! And that's what most of the book hinges on! Not to mention the fact that he could have told the story in about 400 fewer page