The Woman in White

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.

Drawing-master appointment → Woman in White encounter → Laura's marriage to Sir Percival → Fosco's identity swap → asylum imprisonment → Walter's investigation → Fosco's confession and death; sensation machinery at full Victorian power, so plot scores 91.

Count Fosco, though not a rich man, was not a penniless adventurer either. He had a small but sufficient income of his own. He had lived many years in England, and he held an excellent position in society.

Walter Hartright the resolute hero, Marian Halcombe the indomitable sister, Laura Fairlie the persecuted heiress, Count Fosco the corpulent villain, Anne Catherick the woman in white, Frederick Fairlie the neurasthenic uncle — sensation's greatest ensemble, so cast scores 91.

stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

First Epoch hooks with road apparition; Second Epoch slows for Limmeridge domestic intrigue; Third Epoch accelerates through investigation, graveyard, and Fosco's reckoning, so pace scores 87.

Thus, 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—with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect

Collins's testimonial frame — 'the story here presented will be told by more than one pen' — with Marian's trenchant diary voice and Fosco's oily self-portrait; sensation prose at peak clarity, so prose scores 89.

Frederick Fairlie, Esquire, of Limmeridge House, Cumberland, wanted to engage the services of a thoroughly competent drawing-master, for a period of four months certain.

Limmeridge House Cumberland, London drawing-rooms, the asylum, graveyards, and Italian exile — English gothic domesticity fused with continental villainy, so world scores 86.

stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

Walter's opening contract — patience versus resolution — then the midnight Woman in White on the lonely road; one of Victorian fiction's most instantly gripping openings, so hook scores 92.

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

Invented the sensation novel's multi-narrator legal frame, the persecuted-woman plot, and the urbane foreign villain — template for du Maurier, Le Carré, and modern psychological thriller, so innov scores 93.

So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead.

Anne Catherick's ghostly figure 'goes down into the impenetrable gloom' while Laura is restored — structurally double: justice for the living, elegy for the dead, so ending scores 90.