Reading Club: The Woman in White

This Friday the 29th of January we are having a meeting of the Reading Club to speak about the famous novel by Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White.

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist and one of the earliest writers of the mystery story. Although he wrote many books, he is best remembered for The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).

He was a good friend of Charles Dickens and during his life he was a very popular writer in English, but after his death, his reputation declined as Dickens' bloomed. Now, Collins is being given more critical and popular attention than he has received for fifty years. Most of his books are in print, and all are now in e-text. He is studied widely; new film, television, and radio versions of some of his books have been made; and all of his letters have been published. However, there is still much to be discovered about this superstar of Victorian fiction

The Woman in White

The story is sometimes considered an early example of detective fiction with protagonist Walter Hartright employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives. The use of multiple narrators (including nearly all the principal characters) draws on Collins's legal training, and as he points out in his Preamble: "the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness". In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer listed The Woman in White number 23 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 77 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

Links
Audios of the Graded book you have read