- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Walter Hartright, a young drawing master who gets caught up in the mysterious events surrounding the woman in white, opens the novel with this statement. This opening sentence foreshadows certain aspects of the story and supports Collins’s interest in the theme of gender throughout the novel.
Walter’s assertion that women are “patient” and that men are “resolved” reflects conventional nineteenth-century beliefs about gender. Women are believed to be “patient” and enduring because these traits are passive rather than active, and an ideal woman in the Victorian era was one who passively submitted to social expectations and to patriarchal control. Men…