The Woman in White

The Woman in White is a novel by the British writer Wilkie Collins, serialised from 1859 and collected in 1860. It is one of the founding works of the sensation novel, and an early example of detective fiction.

Walter Hartright is walking into London at night when a woman dressed all in white stops him to ask the way and tells him about a wrong that has been done to her. He later learns that she has escaped from an asylum.

Hartright then travels to Limmeridge House in Cumberland to teach drawing to Laura Fairlie, who looks exactly like the woman he met. Laura's engagement to a baronet she dislikes draws her into a scheme involving forged documents and a hidden identity, and Hartright sets out to unravel it.

Collins tells the story through several narrators, including almost all of the principal characters, which draws on his training as a lawyer: as he says in his preface, the story is told by more than one pen. It is a standalone novel, and it helped make the sensational mystery a dominant form of the period.