The Woman in White

Mystery and thriller · Gothic

First published: 1860
Print length: 504 pagesDover Publications, 2005

Description

On a road outside London, young art teacher Walter Hartright encounters a distressed woman dressed in white who has escaped from an asylum. Soon afterward, he takes a position at Limmeridge House in Cumberland and discovers that his student Laura Fairlie closely resembles the stranger, Anne Catherick. Walter and Laura fall in love, but Laura remains bound to an engagement with Sir Percival Glyde, despite an anonymous warning against the marriage. At Blackwater Park, Sir Percival’s financial desperation and Anne’s knowledge of a damaging secret place Laura in mounting danger, while Count Fosco helps devise a scheme that exploits the women’s resemblance. Told by multiple narrators, the mystery assembles competing testimony into a study of identity, confinement, marriage, and the legal vulnerability of women.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Descriptive · Ornate

Pace

Measured

Tone

Atmospheric · Dark · Suspenseful · Unsettling

Structure

Framed · Linear

Focus

Mystery · Plot · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

GenderIdentityLoveMarriageOppressionPower

About Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and travel writer whose career ranged widely across Victorian print culture. A friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, he published in Dickens’s journals and became particularly adept at serial fiction, controlling suspense so that readers would return for each installment. His best-known novels combine Gothic atmosphere, domestic secrecy, disputed identities, and the close examination of evidence. The Woman in White helped define sensation fiction, while The Moonstone established important conventions of detective fiction and the police procedural. Both novels use sequences of narrators with distinct voices, turning perspective itself into part of the mystery: testimony can clarify events, but it can also expose prejudice, partial knowledge, and self-interest. Elsewhere, as in The Dead Secret and Law and the Lady, Collins repeatedly built plots around concealed histories and unresolved questions of guilt. His characteristic achievement lies in joining intricate, suspenseful construction to experiments in narrative form.

The Moonstone Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Dover Publications
Language: English
ISBN: 9780486440965

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