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The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

The first 'sensation' novel

Walter Hartright encounters a mysterious woman dressed head to toe in white on a moonlit road. She is in a state of confusion and distress, and when Hartright helps her find her way back to London, she warns him against an unnamed "man of rank and title." Hartright soon learns that she may have escaped from an asylum and finds to his amazement that her story may be connected to that of the woman he secretly loves. Using multiple narrators to weave a story in which no one can be trusted, The Woman in White is a masterpiece of narrative drive and excruciating suspense.

  • Classification : Classic Crime & Adventure/Thrillers
  • Pub Date : JUN 20, 2023
  • Imprint : YELLOWBACK
  • Page Extent : 764
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9789357311373
  • Price : INR 799
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Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery and early "sensation novel", and for The Moonstone (1868), which, after Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, has been proposed as the first modern English detective novel.

Born to the London painter William Collins and his wife, Harriet Geddes, he moved with them to Italy when he was twelve, living there and in France for two years, learning both Italian and French. He worked initially as a tea merchant. After Antonina, his first novel, appeared in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some of his work appeared in Dickens's journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Collins gained financial stability and an international following by the 1860s but became so addicted to the opium he took for his gout, that his health and writing both declined in the 1870s and 1880s.

Collins criticized the institution of marriage: he split his time between widow Caroline Graves living with her for most of his life, treating her daughter as his and the younger Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children.

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