The Woman in White

The Woman in White is a sensation novel by Wilkie Collins, a prominent Victorian novelist known for helping to establish the modern mystery and detective genres. The Woman in White was published in serialized form in All the Year Round, a periodical run by Collins’s friend and mentor Charles Dickens, from November 26, 1859, to August 25, 1860. This was Collins’s fifth novel, set from 1849 to 1851, a decade before it was published. The narrative is shaped by protagonist Walter Hartright’s investigation of a mystery that begins when he meets a “woman in white” on the road to London. It is made up of a collection of witness testimonies and documents that are collected to shed light on the case—a variation of the epistolary narrative form that was popular in 18th and 19th-century fiction. As such, the story is told by multiple narrators, including many of the primary characters, and explores The Elusiveness of Truth and themes of The Nature of Justice and The Harm of Gender Inequality.

This guide refers to the Classics Collins edition published by Harper Collins in 2011, which is based on the text that Collins prepared for publication as a one- or three-volume edition.