The Woman in White

　　The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

　　The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

作者簡介

　　Wilkie Collins (1824-89) was a prolific novelist, playwright and short-story writer. Born into a family of artists, in later life the writer of thirty novels and lifelong friend of Charles Dickens became addicted to opium, which he took to help relieve the severe pain of 'rheumatic gout', a form of arthritis. He began to suffer from paranoia and hallucinations, including the presence of a 'subjective doppelganger' he named Ghost Wilkie, and the drug plays a prominent part in The Moonstone.