Recommendations
Books Like The Woman in White
Best books to read after The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins's founding sensation novel (1859-60) — Count Fosco's conspiracy, Marian Halcombe's diary, Laura Fairlie's suppressed identity, and the novel that established the genre conventions that mystery fiction has lived by ever since. These recommendations extend the experience through Collins's other major novels, through Victorian sensation fiction, and through the detective and thriller tradition The Woman in White created.
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Buy on AmazonThe Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's other masterwork and the founding detective novel — where The Woman in White is a conspiracy thriller organized around suppressed identity, The Moonstone is a mystery organized around the theft of a diamond; reading both gives the full range of Collins's formal innovations in plot-driven fiction.
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Buy on AmazonArmadale
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's most ambitious novel and the one that contains his finest character — Lydia Gwilt, the Victorian woman villain done in full psychological depth; if Marian Halcombe is Collins's best female protagonist, Lydia Gwilt is his most complex female character of any kind.
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Buy on AmazonBleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's masterwork was the direct predecessor to The Woman in White's conspiracy and mystery elements — the Tulkinghorn murder, Inspector Bucket's investigation, and Lady Dedlock's hidden past are the template that Collins developed into the sensation novel genre; the most important literary context for The Woman in White.
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Buy on AmazonRebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's Gothic novel is the twentieth-century heir to The Woman in White's atmospheric mystery — an unnamed female narrator, a domineering earlier woman (Rebecca/Anne Catherick), an isolated country house, and a conspiracy organized around a woman's identity; the direct twentieth-century descendant of Collins's sensation formula.
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Buy on AmazonNo Name
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's immediately preceding sensation novel — where The Woman in White is organized around an innocent victim of conspiracy, No Name gives us a heroine who is also the schemer; the two novels together show Collins's full range in the sensation genre.
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Buy on AmazonThe Mystery of Edwin Drood
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's unfinished final novel was written in direct competition with Collins's sensation fiction — the psychological villain Jasper and the cathedral city mystery are Dickens's attempt to write in the Collins mode while maintaining his own very different approach to character; the comparison illuminates both authors.
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Buy on AmazonThe Suspicions of Mr Whicher
by Kate Summerscale
Summerscale's account of the Road Hill House murder of 1860 (the most sensational true-crime case of the period) gives the historical context for The Woman in White's sensation elements — the Road Hill case directly influenced Collins's novel, and Whicher is the historical prototype of the sensation detective.
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Buy on AmazonGone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Flynn's psychological thriller is the modern descendant of The Woman in White's manipulation of unreliable narrators and the suppression of female identity — Amy Dunne's reinvention of herself (and the novel's formal games with narrative perspective) are the twenty-first-century version of what Collins pioneered in 1860.
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