The Haunted Hotel: Wilkie Collins

[poliphilo]

 Wilkie Collins wrote two books that are acknowledged classics and two more that should be. The rest of his oeuvre- which is considerable- has a an unsettled status. Much of it remains in print but no-one talks about undiscovered masterpieces. He is uneven. He can be dreary and he can be druggy- and the Haunted Hotel is sometimes one and sometimes the other. It has a virtuous heroine who interests us as little as she interests him- and a villainess who is fun. There's an ingenious plot and a haunting and a great deal of oddity, randomness and skipping from mood to mood. Collins was not a well man and took great quantities of laudanum, and sometimes he's writing to earn a living- and inspiration be hanged- then suddenly his imagination takes wing. You have to tolerate a lot of bad writing to get to the good bits. All in all The Haunted Hotel has the qualities of a fever dream- dreadfully boring and then suddenly lapel-grabbing. It's crummy, it's weird, it's wonderful. 

Comments

[lokbiiviing]

"The Woman in White" made a huge impression on me when I was a child. I did wonder a little bit about the female protagonist who kept saying that she is "only a woman" so much, that even the male protagonist found it odd. But then, that was what all the heroine's in old stories said, so I didn't dwell on it too much.

[poliphilo]

One of the heroines in The Haunted Hotel says that too. I'm not sure quite what Collins meant by it because one of the constants of his work is that he loved to foreground strong and resourceful women