The Woman in White

The first and greatest of the bestselling Victorian thrillers known as 'sensation novels', The Woman in White opens with a chilling encounter between drawing teacher Walter Hartright and a ghostly female figure on a moonlit road. From this moment Walter is drawn into a terrifying world of intrigue, crime, disguise and insanity, as he tries to save his beautiful pupil Laura from the sinister plans of Sir Percival Glyde and the 'Napoleon of Crime', Count Fosco, in one of the most gripping plots in English fiction.

About the Author

William Wilkie Collins, author of the first detective novels in English, was born in 1824. The son of a respected landscape painter, he was named after his painter godfather, David Wilkie. Educated in London, Collins studied to become a barrister, although it was never his intention to practise, and by 1848 he had turned to writing, a number of short works appearing in Charles Dickens' periodicals, Household Words and later, All the Year Round. A first novel, Iolani, set in ancient Tahiti and involving sorcery and sacrifice, though perhaps written as early as 1844, was later rejected by publishers (and only rediscovered and published for the first time in 1999). His second novel, Antonina (1850), set in fifth-century Rome, was a popular success, before Collins' first venture into crime fiction with Basil (1852), a Gothic tale of doppelgangers, bigamy, and hidden family secrets. Developing at once detective fiction and the novel of sensation, Collins' exotic and gripping stories - often involving strong heroines, sinister locales, charlatans, and physical or psychological afflictions - became hugely popular with the reading public. His great novels appeared in the 1860s, when, at the height of his powers, Collins' wrote The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868).