In the Library
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins, 1860
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 18 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 244k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Stoker builds his terror from diaries, letters and testimony stitched together by the people who lived it, the very method Collins pioneered with Walter Hartright's narrative.
£1.99
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Dickens, Collins's friend and editor, gives Lady Dedlock a buried past that a lawyer and a detective close in on, the same aristocratic secret hunted through fog and legal papers.
£1.99
About the book
A drawing-master walks the moonlit road from Hampstead toward London and a hand drops onto his shoulder from behind, and a woman dressed entirely in white stands there alone, escaped. Wilkie Collins published this novel in serial across 1859 and 1860 in Dickens's All the Year Round, and the country queued each week for the next instalment. Walter Hartright takes a post at Limmeridge House and falls in love with Laura Fairlie, who must marry the genial monster Sir Percival Glyde; the conspiracy draws in his canary-keeping accomplice Count Fosco at the rotting grounds of Blackwater Park. The novel invented the form by inventing its detective: a lover, an amateur, an outsider piecing together documents. Identity itself is the contraband at the heart of the plot.