Hidden and Sought: Wilkie Collins’s Gothic Fiction

Abstract

The novels that brought Wilkie Collins most prestige, and which are discussed in this chapter, are very different from his more sensational work examined in Chapter 1. The Woman in White (1861), does indeed include scenes of pure sensation, as that before Lady Glyde’s tomb, when that supposedly dead woman unveils herself to her erstwhile lover, or the mysterious appearance of the ‘woman in white’ herself on the road near Hampstead Heath. However, while inaugurating the new kind of fiction to which the name ‘sensation novel’ would be applied, The Woman in White slips outside of the very genre that it creates: elements in it hark back to the epistolary fictions of Samuel Richardson, and to the Radcliffean model of ‘female’ Gothic.