Is Heathcliff a Murderer? by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [John Sutherland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785783005
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Fosco, we remember, is a mesmerist: the Rubelles are thugs. What we can plausibly suppose is that, like the other luckless Woman in White, Anne was incarcerated for quite some time in a villa in the Regent’s Park district, where she was subjected to barbarous mistreatment, which may well have included sexual abuse. It was this mistreatment which provoked her death from heart failure on 25 July. Fosco, out of guilt, suppresses the fact that he was responsible for Anne’s death by torture, claiming instead that she died of ‘natural causes’, having been in his care only a few hours.

There is, of course, a simpler explanation – namely that Collins simply made another chronological miscalculation. But this seems unlikely. He revised the time-scheme of The Woman in White so conscientiously for the 1861 text, and he was so expert in such dovetailing, that it is much more attractive to assume that he left the anomaly for his more detectively inclined readers to turn up. This reading élite should have the privilege of knowing just how subtle and evil the Napoleon of Crime, Count Fosco, really was.

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