Book Description

A new edition of Wilkie Collins's classic novel, The Woman in White, one of the finest examples of Victorian-era Gothic mystery and suspense. Told from multiple narrative perspectives, The Woman in White begins with the story of Walter Hartright, a young artist and teacher who encounters on the streets of London a mysterious woman in distress who is dressed entirely in white, who he later learns was an escapee from an asylum. Later on, after he has left London and takes a job as a drawing teacher for a family in the English countryside, he meets and falls in love with a young woman who bears a striking resemblance to the mysterious woman he encountered before, which opens the door to discovering dark secrets about the woman and her family. A gripping and suspenseful story of frustrated love, switched identities, and dark secrets, The Woman in White is considered to be one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century and Wilkie Collins's masterpiece. A popular sensation in its own day, it remains widely read and has been the subject of multiple film and screen adaptations. Wilkie Collins (1824 -1889) was an English novelist and playwright best known for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1855), and The Moonstone (1868). Collins is considered by many to be the inventor of the modern English detective mystery novel and was an early writer of "suspense" or "thriller" fiction. His works were and remain popular with both critics and the public, and he regularly is ranked among the most significant and influential English language novelists of all time.