Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel, The Woman in White, marks the first major achievement in the genre now known as the Sensation Novel. With its complex plot, thrilling storyline, engaging characters, and unique narrative structure, the novel was famous in its own time, cementing Collins’s reputation as a major writer of his age. Today, it is still widely read and studied. Popular with general audiences as well as with scholars, it stands as the most famous of Collins’s many novels.

In 1859, Collins began writing The Woman in White. His friend and colleague Charles Dickens had recently started a new periodical All the Year Round, and Dickens wanted to launch the journal with a novel by a kno

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Published 11 April 2006

Citation: Tredennick, Bianca. "The Woman in White". The Literary Encyclopedia. 11 April 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8195, accessed 20 November 2009.]