The New Year Quote by Wilkie Collins

Victorian fiction loved a moral engine, and Collins gives you his in two polished clauses: endurance for her, achievement for him. The sentence sounds like a neutral preview of plot, but it’s also a quiet piece of social programming, smuggling in a gendered division of labor that his readers would recognize instantly. “Patience” isn’t just a personality trait here; it’s an assigned role, a survival strategy in a world where women are expected to absorb upheaval with grace and minimal public complaint. The verb “endure” carries the faint bruise of necessity: this patience isn’t decorative, it’s coerced by circumstance.

Then Collins flips to the masculine half of the Victorian bargain. “Resolution” is active, self-authorizing, almost managerial. It “can achieve,” a verb of results and visible outcomes. Where the woman’s heroism is measured by what she can take, the man’s is measured by what he can do. The symmetry is the point: it reads like fairness, but it’s asymmetrical power made elegant.

Context matters. Collins writes in a period when marriage, property, and reputation were structured to trap women in protracted uncertainty, while men, even when morally compromised, retained greater legal and social mobility. He’s not simply endorsing the arrangement; he’s advertising the kind of suspense his novels specialize in: pressure applied along the fault lines of gender. The line primes readers for a drama where virtue is tested through waiting and suffering, and agency arrives coded as decisive action - a formula that both reflects Victorian ideology and exposes how much narrative energy it takes to keep it believable.