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The Woman in White  (FP: 1868; Penguin Popular Classic (1994), 569) by Wilkie Collins is the first book I read in 2014. It was a selection of the Book and Discussion Club of the Writers Project of Ghana for the month of February*. This is a fantastic story about love - found, lost, and found again; trust and mistrust; impersonation and title-chasing or more specifically an egregious quest for an upward movement into a more respectable class of English society; and about a misunderstanding that ended in divorce and loss (and regain) of reputation.  Laura Fairlie was engaged to marry Baron Percival Glyde; the match was made by Phillip Fairlie, Laura's father, before he died. Marriage between the two was therefore a matter of time, at least until a poor drawing master - Walter Hartright, around whom some of the events in the story surrounded, entered the Limmeridge household. The two - Laura and Hartright - were doomed to love each other the first day they met. Miss Maria...

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. [52] Her nature, too truthful to deceive others, was too noble to deceive itself. [54] Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return? [159] Where is the woman who has ever really torn form her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experience say in answer to books? [188] Crime is in this country what crime is in other countries - a good friend to a man and to those about him...