In 1858, after Rosina ferociously heckled Edward—charging him with adultery, murder, and abuse, among other things—while he gave a speech to his local electors, he paid two thugs to abduct her and had her committed to an asylum, where she was certified insane. Edward tried, but failed, to keep the affair private, and its details emerged in the press. The resulting scandal brought about a reexamination of Rosina’s faculties; this time she was determined to be of sound mind. Present during this hearing was a friend of Collins’s, Bryan Procter, a metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy, who provided the author with information and was rewarded when Collins dedicated The Woman in White to him. Rosina loved the novel; Edward called it “great trash.”

From the rather large number of tales about Collins and his work, it would seem that the author enjoyed exaggerating his own history as much as he enjoyed the exaggerated shocks of his novels. Although the title The Woman in White seems straightforward and appropriately chilling enough, Collins circulated an elaborate tale about the difficulty he had encountered in choosing it. According to this story, which critics later proved apocryphal (date discrepancies would plague Collins throughout his career; some of the first drafts he submitted to Dickens bore the final title), when the novel was approximately one-third written and Dickens was anxious to begin serial publication, it still lacked a final title. While walking along the cliffs one evening, near the resort where he had ensconced himself with his mistress to write the novel, Collins claimed to have smoked an entire case of cigars to no avail as he struggled mightily for a workable name. Flinging himself down upon the grass in confusion, he looked up and, addressing the lighthouse that loomed above him in the gloaming, he allegedly said, “You are ugly and stiff and awkward; you know you are: as stiff and as weird as my white woman. White woman!—woman in white! The title, by Jove!”

Edmund Yates repeats this anecdote, quoting Collins, in a profile of the author that appeared in The World on December 26, 1877, as the latest installment in the series “Celebrities at Home.” Yates describes the author as “a short man, with stooping shoulders and tiny hands and feet, with [a] bright pleasant face looking out of a forest of light-grey, almost white, hair.” Collins asserted to Yates that he had developed his talent for storytelling as a schoolchild, when he earned protection from the ridicule and beatings of his hardier classmates by keeping a bigger boy entertained. “If, however,” Yates explains, “the young story-teller fell short at any time, and could not produce a story to order, his protector and tyrant had an infallible method for stimulating invention, being of opinion that a sound thrashing has an excellent effect in quickening the action of the brain.” Whether or not these beatings were more instructive than the metaphorical ones he endured from his critics is open to question, but Collins’s path to the international fame that The Woman in White generated was not blazed through an overnight success—this was his sixth published novel.

His first short story had been printed sixteen years before the initial installment of The Woman in White appeared, and in the interim he attempted abortive careers as an artist, an apprentice tea merchant, and a fledgling lawyer (he was called to the bar but never practiced). Collins was well educated and had been raised to be a cultured, artistic young man. His family had known poverty, and the two Collins brothers were expected at least to maintain the family’s healthy middle-class status. Collins’s first book-length work to appear in print was a memoir of his father’s life, executed in filial duty and published in 1848, one year after his father’s death. William Collins was an established painter and member of the Royal Academy (his eldest son had been named for the Scottish painter David Wilkie). His socially admirable economic practicality as an artist who was able to support his family through the sale of his paintings manifested itself in what Collins came to view as a disturbing deference to his wealthy patrons. His deep misgivings about his father’s subservient position ultimately helped spur Collins to produce works of social commentary that would question the conventional class hierarchy and the legal status quo, yet it took him a while to find his pet theme: the social and legal injustice of marriage.

The first novel Collins wrote, in 1844, Iólani; or, Tahiti as It Was, a Romance, was rejected by publishers and did not see print until 1999. but his first published novel, Antonina; or, the Fall of Rome (1850), a historical piece, brought him a small measure of success, which permitted his literary pursuits to become a full-time occupation. Collins met Dickens in 1851 and began contributing to his periodical Household Words. Collins and Dickens became close friends who shared an interest not only in literature but also in travel, amateur theatricals, and the opposite sex. Dickens’s theatrical company debuted Collins’s first original play, The Lighthouse, in 1855; Collins’s fortunes as a playwright did not rival his fame in fiction, however. With the exception of the mystery novel The Moonstone (1868), Collins’s novels published after The Woman in White did not meet with similar public acclaim; his last, more didactic, novels in particular foundered.

Collins’s personal life was by all indications extremely successful, depending on how one defines success. At the age of thirty-five in January 1859. just a few months before beginning work on The Woman in White, Collins moved out of his mother’s house and into a residence with his girlfriend, Caroline Graves, a widow with a young daughter. One apocryphal tale of the novel’s inspiration actually names Graves as the source: J. G. Millais, the son of Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, a friend of Collins’s, claimed Collins and Graves met under circumstances comparable to those described in the novel’s creepy first encounter between Walter Hartright and Anne Catherick. As the legend went, Graves allegedly had been imprisoned by an evil mesmerist in a London villa that Collins happened to be standing near when, dressed in flowing white robes, Graves made a dramatic moonlit escape. There is no evidence to prove such a romantic fantasy. Collins and Graves never wed, primarily because he objected to marriage as an institution that trespassed on the natural rights of women. But in 1868 Collins set up a household with a second mistress, a younger country woman named Martha Rudd, who, to preserve some measure of propriety, lived under the name Mrs.