This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and of what a Man's resolution can achieve.

If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.

"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."

Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in white in what soon became one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. An instant success when it first appeared in 1860, this mystery thriller has continued to enthrall readers ever since. Secrets, mistaken identities,surprise revelations, amnesia, locked rooms and asylums, an unorthodox villain, and the breath-taking tension of Collins's narrative created the new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing.

Collins's other great mystery, The Moonstone, has been called the finest detective story ever written,but it was this work that so gripped the imagination of the world that Wilkie Collins had his own tombstone inscribed: "Author of The Woman in White."

PART THE FIRST

 The Narrative of Walter Hartright

 The Narrative of Vincent Gilmore, Solicitor

 The Narrative of Marian Haleombe

 The Narrative of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire

 The Narrative of Eliza Michelson, Housekeeper

 The Narrative of Hester Pinhorn, Cook

 The Narrative of the Doctor

 The Narrative of Jane Gould

 The Narrative of the Tombstone

 The Narrative of Walter Hartright, Resumed

PART THE SECOND

 The Narrative of Walter Hartright

PART THE THIRD

 The Narrative of Walter Hartright

 The Narrative of Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco

 The Narrative of Walter Hartright, Concluded

Bibliography