A close friend of Charles Dickens from their meeting in March 1851 until Dickens’ death in June 1870, William Wilkie Collins was one of the best-known, best-loved, and, for a time, best paid of Victorian fiction writers. But after his death, his reputation declined as Dickens bloomed.
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 becomes embroiled in 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.
