The Woman in White

The Woman in White, a novel by Wilkie Collins published in serialized form in 1859-60, invented a new sub-genre of writing labeled as Victorian Sensation fiction. This genre was wildly popular for two decades and owed much of its success to the rapid growth of the reading public that coincided with the Industrial Revolution. “Sensation” novels focused on shocking (to the Victorian mind) subject matter that is set in ordinary, familiar and usually domestic settings. It borrowed from the traditions of gothic and romance and is said to have given birth to the later procedural and detective genres.
Wilkie Collins was a very successful writer who lived from 1824 to 1889 and was a great friend, and a sometimes collaborator, of Charles Dickens. This novel was first published in Dickens’s periodical All the Year Around.