Laura Fairlie Character Analysis

By Stephen Bray

Laura Fairlie is an enigma presented as a princess. She is an heiress, which perhaps explains her delicacy? For hers is a fragility that even in polite Georgian Society would have been fashionable.

Her entrance into the story is delayed because she is 'nursing that essentially female malady' a slight headache'. One can only speculate that a euphemism is being used for another female malady.

This isn't the sole time that Laura withdraws herself from company on the basis of illness. But her maladies are never the serious ones such as the typhus, which Marian Halcombe contracted. Nor are they in the same category of Dickens' character Little Nell, (Nelly Trent), from 'The Old Curiosity Shop', (Published 1841). And certainly it is impossible to imagine 'Nancy', who was murdered by Bill Sykes in Dickens' Oliver Twist, (Published 1837-39), withdrawing from Fagin, or Sykes on the basis of 'a slight headache'.

[Collins regarded Nancy as the finest character that Dickens ever created.]

Laura Fairlie's delicacy is an indication of her sensitivity. This sensitivity, or sensibility if you will, was a feature of genteel society from the late seventeenth century. These are the days when only the peasant classes were sun-tanned, fashion demanded a pale complexion.

And Laura Fairlie is possessed of fair skin, and blue eyes. Collins artfully avoids referring directly to her figure instead he compares it with that of Marian Halcombe, thus providing us with Laura Fairlie's 'attributes', without causing our minds to dwell upon them in the ways that they must from his description of Marian Halcombe! It's very artful writing!

Her 'gentility' seems somewhat 'dented' after returning to England following her honeymoon. Here we find her at her most robust, especially when she defies her husband and refuses to underwrite his debts without knowing more about them. Nevertheless she seems well out of her depth in her dealing with Glyde and Fosco, and eventually is tricked by them into surrendering herself into their plan which resulted in her being placed in the lunatic asylum.

For the final part of the book, despite her marriage to Hartright, and the birth of their baby son she seems overshadowed by the character of Marian Halcombe. For much of the latter part of the book her personality could be that of Anne Catherick, so much so that elsewhere others, and I, infer that perhaps Wilkie Collins has written a story in which evil really does over-power good.