'The Woman In White' Episode 1 Recap: If Men Were Held Accountable

The Woman In White begins with a cri de cœur before slipping back into Victorian-era melodrama.

Marian: "We need to show the world who these men really are."

The Woman in White starts off in a very 21st-century manner, a story being told back by Marian (Jesse Buckley) to "the only man we were told we could trust," one Mr. Nash (Art Nash). It is a brief moment of fury, full of utterly anachronistic rage against the male sex, something which would have stayed wholly suppressed and unspoken in the real 1859. But it doesn't make the moment any less affecting, grounding what is at this point an extraordinarily old-fashioned tale, done in full period style, to our present day. An explanation, as it were, for why this adaptation and why now.