Ĭollins’ innovative technique was also crucial. During its serialisation, crowds besieged the All the Year Round offices on the day each new instalment was issued. Wilkie Collins himself summed it up: “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait”. What would happen next became a hot dinner-table topic. Collins cleverly manipulated his weekly instalments by leaving readers in suspense with “cliff-hanging” moments. The book’s unusual structure also heightened the breathless excitement of its readers.

His plot, intricate and labyrinthine, is itself inspired by real life ~ by sensational incidents from a French archive of criminal causes célèbre by contemporary concerns about the proper treatment of the insane, prompted by several cases of false incarceration in lunatic asylums by the celebrated trial of Palmer the poisoner and a disastrous scandal involving the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his wife. For a start, he chooses a diverse collection of larger-than-life characters – the mysterious almost ghostly woman of the title (Anne Catherick), a vulnerable wife (Laura), a scheming aristocrat (Sir Percival), an ambitious Italian count who loved white mice (Fosco), an honourable swain-turned-sleuth (Walter), an effeminate hypochondriac (Fairlie) and a 'mannish' lady (Marian Halcombe) – and surrounds them with secrets, identity switches, mystery, violence, forgery, death, mental illness and passion. There were a number of elements that enabled Collins to achieve this. Collins himself called it “the secret theatre of home”. As Henry James commented, ‘to Mr Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious mysteries of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’.”. brought the terrors of the Gothic novel down from mouldering Italian castles into the back parlours and drawing rooms of a recognisably modern, middle class Victorian England…. As Matthew Sweet says, “Using a high-impact style of narrative that put its characters through a series of extreme mental experiences, Collins. The book is now generally regarded as the first sensation novel, an influential genre of Victorian-era fiction – a precursor of modern genre of detective fiction - which “fused the apprehensive thrills of Gothic literature with the psychological realism of the domestic novel”. In the more than a century and a half since then, Collins’ book has never been out of print and is still enjoying considerable success, with numerous reissues and stage and screen adaptations, including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 stage musical and a 2018 BBC television mini-series.

The woman in white book