THE Women in Whit

Abstract

I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met—the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned; the road to Finchley; the road to West End; and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. And so the mystery of The Woman in White truly begins, with a scene that imparted a sudden and unexpected frisson to Victorian readers, a scene that can still cause twenty-first century readers to catch their breath. The warm night, the dark road, the lonely walk, the midnight hour: these are all ingredients masterfully combined by Wilkie Collins to create what his good friend and mentor Charles Dickens considered to be one of the two most dramatic descriptions in literature.1 In fact, this scene, and this novel, helped Collins launch a whole new school of literature in 1860—what came to be known as “sensation fiction”— and led Vanity Fair to identify Collins as “The Novelist who invented Sensation” in 1872.