The Woman in White Reading Order

The Woman in White (1859-60) by Wilkie Collins is the novel that established the sensation genre in Victorian fiction — a story of conspiracy, impersonation, and the deliberate suppression of a woman's identity organized around the figure of the mysterious Anne Catherick (the woman in white of the title) and the conspiracy of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde to deprive Laura Fairlie of her inheritance. The novel is told through multiple first-person narratives by the various witnesses and participants in the events — a technique Collins had used with even greater structural sophistication in The Moonstone — and is built around a mystery that the reader can in principle solve from the available evidence. Count Fosco is one of the great villains of Victorian fiction — enormously fat, obsessed with his white mice, genuinely intelligent, and possessed of a charm that makes him more appealing than most of the novel's heroines — and the novel's most surprising formal move is the decision to give Fosco his own final confession, which is far more honest about his motivations than any of the morally earnest narrators manage to be.