The Woman in White
A drawing master on a dark road meets a woman dressed entirely in white, and within a few pages he is caught in a conspiracy involving a lunatic asylum, a forged marriage register and an Italian count. Collins tells the story through a series of witnesses, each taking over the narrative in turn.
Marian Halcombe is the character everyone remembers: plain, intelligent and given more agency than most heroines of 1859. The novel ran in Dickens's magazine and made sensation fiction a commercial force. Its plotting is still a pleasure, and its use of documents predates the modern detective story.
Public-domain status
First published in 1859. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Wilkie Collins died in 1889, so this work has been free to republish there since 1960.
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- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- London — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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