Wilkie Collins 1: The Woman in White

Secret Life of Books

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The Woman in White was a sensation when it was serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All The Year Round in 1859 and 1860. It begins with an uncanny late-night meeting on the road to London between a young man and a woman dressed entirely in white. It ends with a sensational cat and mouse game between a villain and his pursuers. One of the unsung secrets of Wilkie Collins's novel is the brilliant, unorthodox counter-heroine Marian Halcombe. Another is that Wilkie Collins identified with disfigurement and disability, and used the woman in white to explore some of his own sense of being an outsider.

At the time it Collins's novel belonged to new kind of writing called sensation fiction, which today we call thrillers. It aimed to shock the public by preying on their deepest anxieties, going beyond the facade of Victorian respectability to show ordinary families riven by secrets, including illegitimacy, adultery, madness and criminal activity. The literary inheritors of The Woman in White today are novels like The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl.

Find out how it all started - and why The Woman in White is still a compulsive page-turner 150 years later.

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