The Gothic Lineage
Illustration (AI-generated): A lonely moonlit road on Hampstead Heath at night, a figure of a woman dressed entirely in white standing still beside the road, a young man in a dark coat stopping on the path, London's distant glow below.

Works · Novel · 1859

The Woman in White

by Wilkie Collins

First appeared 26 Nov 1859 – 25 Aug 1860 in All the Year Round

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

On a moonlit road outside London, the young drawing master Walter Hartright is stopped by a woman in white who asks the way to London and protests that she has done nothing wrong. He is bound for a post teaching at Limmeridge House in Cumberland, where he falls in love with his pupil Laura Fairlie and notices her likeness to the stranger. Laura marries Sir Percival Glyde, the clever Marian Halcombe distrusts him and his friend Count Fosco, and the book becomes a legal case assembled from sworn narratives, each witness telling what he or she saw.

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

First Epoch, 'The Story Begun by Walter Hartright', section IV in the Gutenberg text. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #583 (Gutenberg #583 text)

Facts

  1. The novel ran in All the Year Round from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860 in exactly 40 numbers, and in Harper’s Weekly from the same start to 8 September 1860 in 42 numbers; Dickens sold the proof sheets to Harper and Brothers so the two serials appeared at once.[1][2]
  2. Sampson Low’s three-volume edition appeared on 15 or 16 August 1860, before the last serial number; Collins told his mother the first impression was sold on the day of publication.[1][2]
  3. Paul Lewis writes that The Woman in White ‘trebled the profits’ of All the Year Round (citing Robert Patten), and that from July 1860 Dickens paid Collins a one-eighth share of the magazine’s profits in recognition of the rise in circulation.[4]
  4. Reviews in The Guardian (29 August 1860) and The Times (30 October 1860) picked out errors in the story’s chronology, which Collins corrected in the one-volume edition of 1861; the cheap edition was published on 1 May 1861.[2]

Setting

Summer 1849 to 1851 (dates appear in the narratives)[3]

  • Hampstead and London
  • Limmeridge House, Cumberland
  • Blackwater Park, Hampshire
  • Paris

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed dates and attribution
  1. Volume publication day: Gasson says Sampson Low published around 15 August 1860, Collins’s own note gives 16 August, and the Victorian Web says ‘15 or 16 August’. August 1860 is shown.
  2. Harper’s Weekly end date: 8 September 1860 (Gasson, Victorian Web); the 25 August end date belongs to All the Year Round only.

Threads

Threads in

  • In the tradition of The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794

    In the Radcliffean tradition rather than a documented borrowing: Winifred Hughes, as summarised by the Victorian Web, ties the sensation fiction that The Woman in White initiated to a continued taste for the Gothic novel, naming ‘the goosebump gothicism of Ann Radcliffe’.[5]

Threads out

  • A critic's reading links it to Dracula 1897

    The Wilkie Collins Society article calls The Woman in White, narrated by several people through letters, diaries and records, ‘the main influence behind the style of Dracula’, and pairs characters across the two books (Marian Halcombe and Mina Harker, Count Fosco and Count Dracula).[6]

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1859, and the other writers alive when The Woman in White appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).

None within three years.

Alive at first appearance (26 Nov 1859)

Where a date is known only to the month or year, an age is given as the two values it could be.

Sources

  1. 'The Woman in White': Early American and British Editions (1860 and 1861). The Victorian Web. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  2. Andrew Gasson, 'The Woman in White: A Chronological Study' (2010; posted 12 June 2013). The Wilkie Collins Society. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  3. The Woman in White (Project Gutenberg ebook 583). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  4. Paul Lewis, 'Milking the Moonstone: What Wilkie Collins earned from his great detective novel' (August 2022); also notes The Woman in White trebled the profits of All the Year Round. The Wilkie Collins Society. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  5. The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880 (Philip V. Allingham; cites Winifred Hughes on the Gothic roots of sensation fiction). The Victorian Web. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  6. The Possible Influence of Wilkie Collins on Bram Stoker, by Katherine Haynes (1997). The Wilkie Collins Society. Accessed 2026-10-09.