The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is widely considered the first in the genre of “sensation” novels, as well as among the first “mystery” novels and an early example of “detective” fiction.  The story centers on Walter Hartright, a young drawing teacher, and begins with his heart-stopping encounter one moonlit night in London with a woman dressed entirely in white, an escapee from an asylum.   Soon after, he is engaged at Limmeridge House as a private teacher to the beautiful niece of wealthy invalid Frederick Fairlie, Laura. He notices a striking resemblance to the woman of his encounter, who is known to the family as Anne Catherick, a mentally disabled child who had been devoted to Laura’s mother. Laura is engaged to Percival Glyde, a local aristocrat, but naturally falls for Hartright.  Matters become complicated as secrets emerge, revealing strategies past and present developed to circumvent rigid British inheritance laws. Questions of identity and sanity arise, leading Hartright to investigate far and wide to unravel the intrigues of Glyde and his conspirators. The story was serialized in Charles Dickens’  All the Year Round magazine in Britain, where it had the good luck to follow A Tale of Two Cities, and in Harper’s Weekly in the United States, before appearing in book form in 1860 to enormous commercial success, with 8 editions printed in 1860 alone.  The Observer listed the book at number 23 of its “top 100 greatest novels of all time” in 2003, and is ranked at number 77 on the BBC’s The Big Read.

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