The Woman in White

The Woman in White is a novel by the English writer Wilkie Collins, serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round from November 1859 to August 1860 before its publication in three volumes. Narrated through a sequence of first-person accounts assembled like courtroom testimony, it opens when the drawing master Walter Hartright, walking alone at night outside London, encounters a distressed woman dressed entirely in white who has just escaped from a private asylum. Hartright soon travels to Limmeridge House in Cumberland to tutor two half-sisters, Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe, and falls in love with Laura, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman in white, Anne Catherick; Laura is nonetheless bound by her late father's wish to marry the baronet Sir Percival Glyde, whose need for her fortune conceals a guarded secret about his own birth. After the marriage, Glyde and his charming, sinister ally Count Fosco conspire to seize Laura's inheritance by secretly confining her in the same asylum under Anne's identity while passing off Anne's corpse, following her death, as Laura's own, leaving Marian and Walter to uncover the conspiracy and restore Laura's true identity. Widely regarded as one of the first novels in the English sensation fiction genre and an important forerunner of detective fiction, drawing partly on real Chancery cases of disputed identity and unlawful confinement that Collins had researched, the novel was an immediate popular sensation on its release and has remained continuously in print, its plotting and use of multiple unreliable narrators influencing generations of later mystery writers.