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Cover of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White

  • 544 pages ยท about 9 hours
  • First published 1860
  • 653 editions
  • Free to read

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1 About this book

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison.

Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Good for readers who want: a mystery, a classic, and a long read.

  • Mystery
  • Classics
  • Mystery & detective, traditional
  • Thrillers
  • Psychiatric hospital patients
  • Inheritance and succession
  • Country homes
  • Deception

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3 About Wilkie Collins

1824โ€“1889

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 โ€“ 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1860), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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