The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

“There… stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.”

The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest ‘Sensation Novel’. Walter Hartright’s mysterious midnight encounter with a strange woman draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.

The novel is dominated by two of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction – Marian Halcombe, dark, mannish, yet irresistibly fascinating, and Count Fosco, the sinister and flamboyant ‘Napoleon of Crime’. A masterwork of intricate construction, The Woman in White set new standards for suspense and excitement, and achieved sales which topped even those of Dickens, Collins’ friend and mentor.

This new critical edition is the first to use the manuscript of the novel, and includes a chronology of the novel’s complicated events.