The Woman in White

THE EXCEEDINGLY RARE TRUE FIRST ISSUE, FIRST STATE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION OF COLLINS’S MASTERPIECE—ONE OF THE FOUNDATIONAL WORKS OF DETECTIVE AND SENSATION FICTION—IN THE DISTINCTIVE PICTORIAL BINDING DEPICTING THE WOMAN IN WHITE.

This copy possesses the identifying points of the earliest American issue: the first-issue binding with the Woman in White stamped in white on the spine; two pages of Harper’s advertisements dated August 1860 preceding the title page; and the erroneous spelling “Miss Muloch” on the first page of the four-page advertisement gathering at the rear, subsequently corrected to “Miss Mulock.”

Its September 1860 ownership inscription is particularly evocative: the book was already in a reader’s hands within weeks of its American publication.

Published serially in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round beginning in 1859, The Woman in White transformed Wilkie Collins from a successful writer into an international literary phenomenon. Its extraordinary combination of Gothic atmosphere, domestic conspiracy, legal intrigue, psychological suspense, and multiple narrators helped establish the Victorian “sensation novel” and anticipated central techniques of modern detective fiction.

The story begins with one of the most celebrated encounters in nineteenth-century fiction: drawing master Walter Hartright, walking alone outside London at night, encounters a mysterious and distressed woman dressed entirely in white. He soon learns that she has escaped from an asylum. When Hartright subsequently takes a position teaching drawing to Laura Fairlie—a young woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the stranger—the encounter opens into an elaborate conspiracy involving identity, inheritance, incarceration, and murder.

Collins, who had studied law and was called to the bar in 1851, constructed the novel as though presenting a case before a court. As he explains in his preamble, the narrative is told “by more than one pen, as the story of an offense against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness.” Evidence accumulates through testimony, letters, diaries, and documents, requiring the reader to participate in the reconstruction of events. The method proved enormously influential.

The novel emerged from Collins’s close friendship and professional association with Charles Dickens. Collins became a regular contributor to Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, and the two men collaborated theatrically and traveled together. During an extended stay in Paris in 1856, Collins encountered published records of French criminal trials that helped furnish material for The Woman in White. Dickens, in turn, acknowledged Collins’s influence on the increasingly intricate plotting and suspense of his own later fiction.

The novel appeared in book form on both sides of the Atlantic in remarkably close succession. The London three-volume edition issued by Sampson Low appeared in August 1860, followed approximately two weeks later by Harper & Brothers’ New York edition. Earlier bibliography sometimes accorded priority to the American edition, but subsequent research has established the probable priority of the London publication.

The American edition nevertheless possesses particular textual interest. Harper’s text remained substantially closer to the original All the Year Round serialization than the extensively revised Sampson Low edition. Harper continued to reprint this version for years, preserving chronological inconsistencies and other features of the serialized text before producing a revised uniform edition of Collins’s works around the time of his American visit in 1873.

The immediate success of The Woman in White was extraordinary. Collins became one of the most commercially successful novelists of his generation, and the book helped redirect popular fiction toward the secrets concealed within apparently respectable domestic life. Henry James memorably credited Collins with introducing into fiction “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” Its influence extended through sensation fiction into the detective novel, psychological thriller, and modern crime narrative.

Collins himself understood that this was the book by which he would be remembered. Before his death in 1889, he requested an epitaph identifying him simply as the “Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.”

A SUPERB SURVIVAL OF THE RAREST FORM OF THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. The combination of the earliest issue points, the September 1860 ownership inscription, and exceptionally well-preserved white pictorial stamping makes this an unusually compelling copy of one of the landmarks of nineteenth-century popular fiction.