to August 4, 1860). More interestingly, it commenced one column over from the conclusion of Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities, and the juxtaposition of the inspirational final words of Dickens’s text with the chilling first words of Collins’s cannot fail to capture the reader’s attention. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known,” Sydney Carton proclaims in the legendary last line from A Tale of Two Cities, as he goes to the guillotine in place of a better man than he so that this man may return to the woman Carton himself loves. He certainly demonstrates resolution, as well as enacting a personal redemption, in making the ultimate sacrifice, and for the contemporary reader—or today’s reader who wants to perform an interesting comparison—Collins’s hero, no matter who he turns out to be, obviously has a lot to live up to. Sydney Carton is a hard act to follow.

But these brusque new lines of Collins’s signify a larger shift in temperament between the two novels, a move from Dickens’s brilliantly evolved characterizations, vast social sweep and scale, and stateliness of narrative to Collins’s heralding the advent of the pure sensation novel, of which The Woman in White represents an early and prime example. Collins is universally acknowledged as the master of the Victorian sensation novel, a wildly popular genre that managed to transmit the shocks and surprises familiar to readers of hair-raising Gothic novels but that contained no, or generally no, supernatural elements. Yet the usually domestic crimes described in sensation novels—whose authors prided themselves on their realism in opposition to outrageous Gothic conventions—were mainly of a lurid nature and many times were impossible to imagine happening in the real world. As an anonymous critic of the trend argued in the Dublin University Magazine (February 1861), “The spirit of modern realism has woven a tissue of scenes more wildly improbable than the fancy of an average idealist would have ventured to inflict on readers beyond their teens.” Sensation fiction was precursor of the mystery thriller and the detective novel, and it proved extremely attractive to a Victorian audience primed with an appetite for scandal and for shocks that could not be sated by the gruesome accounts of crimes readers devoured in the cheap daily newspapers.

When The Woman in White was released in book form for the first time, in August 1860, the author requested that potential reviewers refrain from mentioning any plot details, because such revelations would spoil the enjoyment of the novel’s mysterious twists and turns for anyone who had somehow avoided reading or hearing about them in the previous year. So first, an important warning for the reader of the present introduction: Spoiler alert! Because of Collins’s desire to maintain such suspense, the reader who prefers to be kept completely in the dark about what happens in this novel may want to read this introduction as an afterword. Although it neither gives away the ending nor reveals certain pivotal secrets that the characters go to great lengths to protect, it does openly discuss aspects of some of the events and characterizations and, in so doing, discloses a few salient details.

As we progress past the opening lines of The Woman in White and delve a bit further, we learn that the unfortunate, patient woman’s troubles are fundamentally of the legal variety (the law fails utterly as an effective recourse for her); that the resolute man is our present narrator, who adores and wants to help our heroine (who, frail and voiceless, is not fully realized enough as a character to be a true heroine; that role is reserved for her more assertive half-sister); and that a novel we may have thought, given its evocative, potentially spooky title, would be a Gothic tale of supernatural terrors and pale wraiths turns out to be a novel simply of sensational plotting, family treachery, and absolutely nothing paranormal. Even the title character herself is not a spirit; rather, she is a disturbed young woman who insists on wearing white only because someone she adored and respected once told her it suited her. The unexpected touch of her hand on his shoulder thrills the narrator who introduces her, and their first meeting is eerie given its surprise and isolated, moonlit setting; but such a touch is a familiar gesture and, here, not in the least supernatural.

Collins instead has written a tense captivity narrative sans the phantoms, demons, and spiritual perverts that populate the Gothic novel. His villains may be cruel and preternaturally greedy, but avarice is a sin of the living. These scoundrels have clearly human and, as Collins has designed them, ultimately convenient incapacitating vulnerabilities: Sir Percival Glyde has a damning secret, while Count Fosco lives in fear of the betrayals he has perpetrated against certain dangerous parties. Just when the novel’s claustrophobic scope and set upon set of internal barriers to the heroine Laura Fairlie’s rescue and reinstatement seem insurmountable, hints of the villains’ weaknesses surface, providing a glimpse of hope. Collins set his sensational plots in what he called the “secret theater of home,” a breeding ground for “realistic,” behind-closed-doors stories he rendered as thrilling as the extraordinarily weird Gothic domestic sphere. The theory behind the fear haunted houses evoke is that places that should make us feel safe—that is, our homes and hearths, the comfortable family zone—are suddenly made surreally unsafe, removing from us any means of escape or reassurance. Collins augments this fear in The Woman in White by allowing a set of villains to haunt an otherwise respectable, aristocratic household—our reprobates here are a baronet and a count. In so doing, Collins makes the crimes hiding beneath the veneer of moneyed society that much more insidious.

As American novelist Henry James noted in his 1865 review of another sensation novel (in The Nation, November 9), “To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” Collins’s novels, like those of his friend Dickens, also brought to his readers’ door the specters of various Victorian social ills. With The Woman in White, Collins attempted to call attention to both the legal nullification of married women’s rights and contemporary cases of false imprisonment in mental institutions, which had inspired the so-called “lunacy panics”—terrors of just such situations—that had swept Britain immediately before Collins began work on this novel. (Of course, he was also exploiting the public’s fear of such crimes in order to sell more copies of his book.) Laura’s swapped identity, misapplied diagnosis, and utter lack of legal recourse share characteristics with the typical case of its kind. One likely immediate source for the false-imprisonment plot of The Woman in White came from outside Britain. In 1856, while visiting Paris, Collins purchased Receuil des causes célèbre, by Maurice Méjan, an account of eighteenth-century French criminal cases, published in 1808. One case concerned the perfidious committal to a mental institution of a Madame de Douhault, a widow involved in an inheritance dispute with her brother, who had usurped most of their father’s estate. On her way to Paris to confront her sibling, she fell victim to a criminal conspiracy involving her friends and relatives. A family friend drugged Mme. de Douhault, who awoke days later in the Salpêtrière asylum, where she had been admitted under a false name. Her brother had spread the news of her death, and though she ultimately managed to effect her release, she never regained her estate or her rightful name, as her brother kept the case tied up in the courts for years.

Another case of false imprisonment that proved inspirational for Collins touched his artistic circle directly and involved the novelist and baronet Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his estranged wife, Rosina. In the twenty years following their separation, Rosina subjected Edward to a number of very public attacks and humiliations, including writing disparaging letters about him to newspapers and penning accusatory, thinly veiled portraits of him in a series of novels.