A Most Dangerous Woman
This entertaining collection proves the enduring appeal of two 19th-century classics, the Victorian serial novel and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. In nine installments or “episodes” (available for purchase as the complete “season”), Clough picks up after the ending of Collins’ beloved sensation novel with Laura happily married to Walter Hartright, bouncing Baby Walter on her knee and reassuring her clever and under-utilized half-sister, Marian Halcombe, that she too might find love. This Marian promptly does in the person of the mild-mannered scholarly publisher Theo Camlet, who comes with two children after his first wife died in Italy.
While the opening episodes plot a charming and conventional love story, the book splashes into lurid and welcome sensation-slash-mystery territory when the first Mrs. Camlet shows up alive, well, and up to something. An enceinte Marian flees north while Theo is tossed in jail for bigamy, but worse follows when the enigmatic Mrs. Camlet dies under mysterious circumstances. With her beloved Theo behind bars for murder and Walter assisting as an amateur sleuth, and thus able to narrate parts of the story from places no woman would have been allowed to go, Marian uncovers the shocking truth of just how dangerous the original Mrs. Camlet really was.
Clough makes the characters uniquely her own, no easy feat given that Collins’ intelligent, interesting Marian ranks among the most admired literary heroines. Her language and detail evoke the period, while her plotting is fast enough to suit modern sensibilities, and she litters her cliff-hangers with references and literary in-jokes that will delight Collins fans and literature buffs. Amid gunplay, sudden deaths, startling revelations, and incipient childbirth, Marian traverses the perils of Victorian wifehood, motherhood, and domesticity with as much aplomb as she faces down anarchists and murderers. It’s smashing good fun.
