Has anyone read Collins' /The Woman in White/?

[Larkspurlane]

Xposted from several other forums... one never knows where one will find English lit nerds.

Re: Collins' The Woman in White. I can't remember how Laura Fairlie's mother vanishes from the narrative. I'm assuming that she dies at some point in Laura's childhood but I can't remember reading that. All I recall about her is in those letters about Anne Catherick -- no mention of her dying at that point though. Anyone remember?

I don't have time to flip through this 700 page behemoth looking for the reference/explanation so I'm going to hope someone out there has read it more attentively than I have.

I'm charting the effect of the partial/broken family on the heroines of a couple 19th c sensationalist novels. I'm finding lots of hopelessly inadequate father figures & mother figures who are mostly absent. Maybe the fact that Laura's mother is so absent that I can't even recall where she goes off to is telling in itself.

I'll check back later... if this doesn't pan out, I'll just gesture vaguely to Laura's mother's absence and move on to another point. T.I.A.

(Paper's due tomorrow at 4pm. HEH.)

[Foghawk]

I can't claim to have read it very carefully, or even completely - but since it's 19th century, it's in the public domain, which means there are digitised versions. Google Books has copies here and here - or, better yet, you can grab a copy from Project Gutenberg here. Those'll be much more convenient to go through - plus, they're searchable. If nothing else, you can go through every instance of the word 'mother'.

[Larkspurlane]

Ahh, that is a genius idea. I didn't even think of doing that. DUH.

Sadly this thing is due in 1:15hrs and I have to get my ass to campus. In the end I made some vague mention of it in a listed sequence of missing mothers and then looked in more depth at other absent maternal figures whose mysterious disappearances I actually knew about.

But I'm totally keeping this in mind for next time, so thank you very much!