The Woman in White

Well yes, naturally I watched it, the book being a long time favourite; and despite a strong inclination to stop after episode one, I did in fact stay with it.

As adaptations of C19 novels go it wasn't at all bad. They did make Count Fosco (above) thin, young and attractive which in the book he is not, being middle aged, corpulent and reptilian, as well as having a disgusting habit of keeping mice in his clothes. The last time they tackled TWiW the Beeb in its wisdom changed Glyde's secret, making him a child molester which, although it doubtless chimed with the zeitgeist, wasn't what the original story was all about. Possibly at the time the production executives couldn't trust the watching public to appreciate the difficulties that would accrue were Glyde discovered to be illegitimate. Or they couldn't manage/be bothered  to produce a script which explained it. 

What I found really uncomfortable in this was the ease with which Laura was incarcerated in a madhouse by her husband. I am finding it increasingly difficult to watch television or listen to radio which in concerned with the brutal and careless entitlement of the way men treat women. I know it takes more than a large tip to a compliant doctor from a husband to get a wife shut away in an asylum these days, although I suspect that a lot of male doctors ( and policemen and judges and teachers) are still wired to place more belief in a male partner's assertion that a woman is 'mental' than in the woman's assertion that she is not, especially if she has been revoked into retaliatory violence. Conjugation 'I am justifiably angry, you(male) have a bit of a temper, she is dangerously hysterical'. It's an unconscious bias that hangs around from the very time in which Collins was writing books like TWiW;  it angers, appals and distresses me in almost equal measure and I find it difficult to cope with. Especially in this where  the scenes in the asylum were fairly graphic. 

In fact so upsetting did I find it that I started to wonder if my very long love affair with the C19 novel was perhaps over. And  then I thought of what a world without the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell would be like and realised that, fortunately, it wasn't.