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The Woman in White
Book

The Woman in White

London, 1860

Literary Classic

  • Crime
  • Victorian literature

What It’s About

More than Just Sensation Fiction

In order to restore his love’s stolen identity, the young drawing master Walter Hartright turns master detective. With The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins created one of the finest examples of the sensation novel – a hugely popular genre of the 19th century. It made Collins a rich man overnight and remains to this day one of his best-known and most popular novels. The combination of a masterfully constructed storyline and a diverse set of characters entertains and keeps the reader in suspense. Yet The Woman in White is more than just a sensation novel – its socio-critical undertones question the restrictions Victorian society placed on woman and the limitations the 19th-century class system imposed on them.

Summary

Midnight Encounter

Artist Walter Hartright takes a position as drawing master for two young ladies at Limmeridge House, a large estate in the Lake District in the north of England. On the evening before his departure, Walter visits his mother and sister in Hampstead Heath. He decides to walk back home across the heath, where a young woman dressed entirely in white stops him to ask for directions to London. She seems upset, and Walter offers to accompany her. She accepts, but only on the condition that he will let her leave when and how she decides. Walter promises, and they continue on their way. Walter tells her that he is leaving London for Cumberland in the morning, and to his surprise, he finds that the woman knows Limmeridge House and has good memories of the place and the family there, in particular the late Mrs. Fairlie. As they reach the edge of London, Walter manages to get a carriage for the woman, and they part ways. Only ten minutes later, two men in an open carriage pass Walter. They stop a policeman, and Walter overhears them asking him whether he has seen a woman dressed in white. They tell him she has escaped from an asylum...

About the Author

Wilkie Collins was born on January 8th, 1824 in London. The landscape painter William Collins was his father. Wilkie Collins spent part of his childhood in Italy, where he received little formal education. At the age of 17, he entered into an apprenticeship with a tea trade company. He then went on to study law and became a barrister – though he never practiced law. Versatile and talented, Collins wavered for many years between wanting to become a painter or a writer. In 1851, he exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 1850 he published his first novel, Antonina. One year later, he met Charles Dickens, who was to become his mentor and friend. The two traveled the United Kingdom and the United States together and collaborated on many stories. Collins was a prolific writer: He wrote 25 novels and 50 stories, but his most successful works were The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which gained him great success and admiration from the public. Collins never married but was in relationships with two women at the same time. He had three children with Martha Rudd, who was 20 years his junior. The older Caroline Graves married another man, but after his death returned to Collins. The love triangle continued until Collins’s death. Collins suffered from rheumatism all his life, and he regularly took laudanum, an opiate, to control the pain. After Dickens’s death in 1870, Collins’s addiction to the drug became serious, resulting in hallucinations and the loss of mental faculty. He died of a heart attack on September 23, 1889 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.


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