The Woman in White (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Collins, William Wilkie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192834290 ISBN 13: 9780192834294

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998

Synopsis

The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest "Sensation Novel." Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. This new critical edition is the first to use the original manuscript of the novel. John Sutherland examines Collins's contribution to Victorian fiction, traces his practices as a creator of plot, and provides a chronology of the novel's complicated events.

About this title

From the Publisher

"There in the middle of the broad, bright high-road-there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven-stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments." Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in white in what soon became one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Secrets, mistaken identities, surprise revelations, amnesia, locked rooms and locked asylums, and an unorthodox villain made this mystery thriller an instant success when it first appeared in 1860, and it has continued to enthrall readers ever since. From the hero's foreboding before his arrival at Limmeridge House to the nefarious plot concerning the beautiful Laura, the breathtaking tension of Collin's narrative created a new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing. Collins other great mystery, The Moonstone, has been called the finest detective story ever written, but it was this work that so gripped the imagination of the world that Wilkie Collins had his own tombstone inscribed: "Author of The Woman In White. . . "

From the Back Cover

On a lonely moonlit road, a young drawing teacher meets a mysterious woman, dressed all in white, only to be struck by her eerie resemblance to his pupil, the beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie. Who is this ghostly woman in white? And what secret does she hold over Sir Percival Glyde, Laura s sinister fiancé? This gripping dramatization of the classic Victorian suspense novel opens in a London courtroom, where an inquiry into Laura s suspicious death is underway. As various characters recount the weeks leading up to her marriage and sudden illness, Collins s chilling tale of love, greed, and insanity springs to life with the aid of a brilliant cast, including Stratford Festival star Douglas Campbell as the diabolical Count Fosco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0192834290
• ISBN 13: 9780192834294
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 752
• Editor: Sutherland John