Wilkie Collins' sixth novel took the fashionable world by storm on its appearance in 1860, when everything from dances to dresses was named after the "woman in white". Nicholas Rance is the author of "Historical Novel and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England".

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop .. There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth .. stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot 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.