Is it not a possibility that both Marian Halcombe and Walter Hartright see Laura Fairlie alive, when in fact she really is Anne Catherick? And might not Hartright have so threatened Fosco, that the wiley confidence trickster thought it better to pen the confession that Hartright wanted to read, rather than the truth?

If you answer yes, then the story has a very different meaning and ending. But if you answer no, could your reply not also be because you, like Walter and Marian, want Laura to survive even if Anne is to be sacrificed in her stead?

We must remember, of course, that 'The Woman In White' is a work of fiction, and so such conjectures are not about the truth in an absolute world, but rather concern the motives of Wilkie Collins as the book's author, and you dear reader, as the person who must decide what model of the world you choose to allow this work to portray?

These legalistic details aside Collins makes an admirable job of writing in a woman's style in the two lengthy sections that comprise Marian Halcombe's Diaries.

Marian Halcombe is in a sense the most substantial of the heroines. Certainly she is the most intelligent of them. The other heroic women are Ann Catherick and Laura Fairlie.

Ann Catherick is portrayed as the image of emotive and irrational woman. We discover she is both illegitimate, and also suffers from personality difficulties. Although she is helped by Mrs Clements, a kind elderly woman who helped to bring her up, she has been the victim of emotional abuse from her true mother, and also falsely imprisoned within an asylum. Her action that preceded her incarceration is understandable, and it is really through a number of literary devises that Collins infers her to be mentally handicapped. The evidence of her actions, her ability to read and write, despite her childhood upbringing, her desire for justice and her willingness to act and will Mrs Clements to act with her suggest her impairments be more a result of her history than hereditary ones. She is the unacknowledged half-sister of Laura and Marian but Collins only allows us to recognise this once she is laid to rest in Lady Glyde's grave.

If Ann is the active irrational woman, Laura Fairlie is her neurasthenic mirror-image. They even look alike! Although she positively doesn't want to marry Sir Percival Glyde Ann does so out of respect for the wishes of her dead father, in the full knowledge that such a marriage cannot bring her happiness. Moreover she easily falls victim to Count Fosco's plan, after which her personality unravels into something akin to that of Ann Catherick following  false imprisonment in the same asylum where Ann Catherick had spent time. Later Collins bestows upon her the boon of childbirth, by which she redeems the family fortune, and makes a gentleman of Walter Hartright.

Marian Halcombe is the real heroine. She displays courage, imagination, perseverance, resourcefulness and it is also her world that we experience so vividly through the entries in her diary. If Walter Hartright truly married Laura Fairlie then it was a bigamous marriage. For it is clear that long before he slips the ring on Laura's finger there has been a marriage between his mind and that of Marian. They connive together virtually from their very first meeting in the early chapters of 'The Woman In White' when Walter Hartright is emplyed as a drawing-master at Limmeridge. Marian and Wlater decide what is best for Laura. Marian and Walter support her when she is ill. Indeed Marian spells out the relationship with her words:

"Wait here, my brother! ~~ wait, my dearest, best friend, till Laura comes, and tells you what I have done now!"

There was considerable criticism of Marian Halcombe's character when the 'The Woman In White' first appeared, and this has been much repeated. Critics found her to be 'subversive', (an epithet that Collins would have appreciated). By binding Marian, Laura and Hartright together Collins has created a kind of ménage, and it is not a-sexual. Indeed Hartright meets Marian before Laura and his thoughts concerning her body are very clear, even when dressed in the rhetoric of the C19.

"I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays."