Marian-Laura’s steadfast companion, despite the men’s best efforts-fends off the advances of Percival’s Italian friend, the married Count Fosco ( Riccardo Scamarcio). She leaves the home she knows for Percival’s manor, Blackwater-a monument to gloomy hallways, hushed conversations, and eavesdropping in the shadows.

The limitations of the production, and the sensibilities of the story’s original Victorian audience, prevents it from getting even marginally as disturbing as the average Lifetime original movie.īut what does meet the audience’s expectations is the near-hysterical fear of the two women, which worsens after the marriage. Ultimately The Woman in White, adapted for TV by writer Fiona Seres, doesn’t go as far as the audience’s imagination does. The act takes place between men and women.” Where the women give birth, which is often their last. Where we are born, and that is our first peril in life and it is There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable “Why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay It’s a wonderful, exaggerated pose of machismo, one that makes the dread of his bride-to-be all the more relatable. Twenty years ago, Scott played a version of Prince Charming opposite Drew Barrymore in Ever After here, he’s a puffy faced, sneering villain, who looks upon his betrothed with walleyed disdain. Half-sisters Marian ( Jessie Buckley) and Laura ( Olivia Vinall) live with their uncle ( Charles Dance, resplendently evil) until he pushes Laura, a well-regarded beauty, into marriage with a man she barely knows: mysterious, disgruntled baronet Percival, played with broad, mustache-twirling ill intention by Dougray Scott. What’s so disturbing about the story is the sheer terror of its female protagonists’ unknown future-how little understanding or control they have over their fates, in a world ruled by men. In the new five-part TV adaptation of the book, first produced for the BBC and currently airing on PBS, there’s no blood, no ghosts, and only a few high-pitched screams-hardly a Halloween fright fest.īut The Woman in White still scared me-especially its second and third hours. Now that we can navigate to the most bloodcurdling horror footage ever imagined by the darkest recesses of the human brain in mere seconds, the dread of two half-sisters left in the thrall of a forbidding older gentleman hardly seems scary. At the time, the serialized novel-which pulled readers through gloomy manors, squalid asylums, and Honduras-was a transporting tale of thrills and chills.

It’s difficult to imagine the narrow worldview that would be shocked and frightened by Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel The Woman in White, the so-called 'sensation' novel that became the author’s best-selling and best-remembered work.

The woman inwhite