The Woman in White

Serialized in 1859 and published as a complete work in 1860, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White catapulted the English writer’s career to new—and lucrative—heights during his lifetime, making his work the talk of middle-class Victorian society. The epistolary novel, which was published in Charles Dickens’s journal All The Year Round, follows multiple narrators to fictionalize a true case that Collins found in a French crime book called Recueil des Causes Celebres. In The Woman in White, Frederick Fairlie is a well-to-do hypochondriac who hires Walter Hartright to tutor his niece and heiress, Laura Fairlie, as well as her half-sister Marian Halcombe. Hartright and Laura develop feelings for each other, but she honors her father’s wishes and marries her betrothed, Sir Percival Glyde, a dislikable figure with questionable motives. The titular character comes in the form of the mysterious Anne Catherick, a falsely imprisoned woman who has escaped from an institution and knows a secret that could disrupt Glyde’s plans. When Laura is drugged and committed to the asylum as Anne, Hartright takes on the role of a detective, turning to sleuthing techniques to prove Laura’s identity and uncover what Glyde is hiding.

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With its use of melodrama and domestic realism, the novel helped to pioneer the genre of sensation fiction. It also put a new twist on the tropes of gothic romance while serving as an early iteration of a detective novel. Two months into its serialization, Dickens called the story “masterly,” and to this day, the book is widely regarded as a classic. —Armani Syed

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