In England in the 1860s, a new genre of fiction emerged which became known as 'sensation fiction'. With its antecedents in the Gothic and 'Newgate' novels of earlier decades, 'sensation fiction' peered beneath the surface gentility of Victorian domesticity and revealed a world of bigamy, madness, murder and violence supposedly lurking there. It was all too much for some critics. One described the genre as 'unspeakably disgusting' and castigated its 'ravenous appetite for carrion'. The best-known purveyor of 'sensation fiction' was Wilkie Collins. Collins was the son of a well-known landscape painter and his first literary work was a life of his father but, encouraged by his friend Charles Dickens, he began publishing fiction in the 1850s. The Woman in White, published in 1860, is a melodramatic and complicated tale of a conspiracy to dispossess an heiress of her money, filled with dark secrets of lunacy, illegitimacy and mistaken identities and made memorable by the suave and sinister Italian, Count Fosco. The novel unfolds through a series of first person narratives by different characters. Drawing master Walter Hartright tells of his eerie night-time encounter with the eponymous 'woman in white' and of his experiences at Limmeridge House in Cumberland where he meets and falls in love with Laura Fairlie, a girl who bears a striking resemblance to her. Marian Halcombe, Laura's intelligent and strong-minded half-sister, provides further parts of the story in extracts from her diary. Gradually the plot by the villainous Sir Percival Glyde and his accomplice Fosco to gain control of Laura's fortune is revealed. Much of Collins's later fiction is marred by his determination to move away from mystery and suspense, at which he excelled, to fiction with a social purpose, at which he did not, but, in The Woman in White, he created the archetypal example of 'sensation fiction'.

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