The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
List: $63.00 | Sale: $44.11
Club: $31.50

The Woman in White

Author: Wilkie Collins

Narrator: Glen McCready, Rachel Bavidge, and cast

Unabridged: 28 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Naxos

Published: 09/01/2008

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

Wilkie Collins is a master of suspense, but his transfer to audiobook requires a cast of readers to faithfully reflect the eleven different characters who tell the story. Walter Hartright, a drawing teacher to two sisters, wants to marry Laura, though she is betrothed to another. But who is the mysterious woman in white who he encounters? Naxos AudioBooks brings together a strong cast to bring alive the mystery and suspense of The Woman in White. Also available abridged.

About Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist who critics often credit with the invention of the English detective novel. Sergeant Cuff from Collins's novel The Moonstone became a prototype of the detective hero in English fiction. Collins's works center on mainstream Victorian domestic life. Collins liked to tackle social issues, and many of his novels contain sympathetic portraits of physically abnormal individuals. In addition to Moonstone, he is well known for his popular suspense thriller The Woman in White, No Name, and Armadale.

Collins was born in London in 1824 to William Collins, a well-known landscape painter, and Harriet Collins, the daughter of a painter. Despite a secure home, he was a small, sickly child and had a slightly deformed skull. He was educated privately and studied painting for several years. He later studied law and became a lawyer at the age of twenty-seven. Collins never practiced law, but he did put his legal knowledge to work in his crime writing.

In 1851, Collins met his lifelong friend and mentor Charles Dickens while they were pursuing a mutual interest in amateur theater. Dickens helped Collins bring humor and believable characters into his books.The two women in Collins's life-Caroline Graves, his life-long companion, and Mrs. Martha Rudd, his mistress-also greatly influenced his writing.

During the 1860s, Collins started to suffer severely from rheumatic pains and became addicted to laudanum, a form of opium. The death of Dickens in 1870 robbed him of his powerful inspiration, and his popularity declined. In 1873, he met Mark Twain and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on a trip to the United States. Soon thereafter he wrote The Evil Genius, which was published in 1886. Collins died from a stroke on September 23, 1889.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Grace Tjan on August 06, 2012

Beware of spoilers! What I learned from this book (in no particular order) : 1. Italians are excitable, dedicated to the opera, and most likely to be involved with organized crime. 2. Beware of fat, jolly Italian counts with submissive wives and fondness of white mice and canaries. 3. Watch out if your......more

Goodreads review by Bill on March 17, 2020

The only real flaw in this densely plotted page-turner of a novel is that in the end it slightly disappoints because it promises more than it delivers. It makes the reader fall in love with its plain but resourceful heroine Marian Halcombe, and teases us with the delightful prospect that she will be......more

Goodreads review by Bionic Jean on February 05, 2025

The Woman in White is an extraordinary book. It captivated the reading public of the time, and in parts is almost as breathlessly mesmerising and gripping to read now. Wilkie Collins professed the “old-fashioned” idea, that “the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story”, and wha......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 22, 2018

Laura Fairlie’s journal – June 6th, 1855 This morning in the garden I sketched a small flower and was overcome with exhaustion. I retired to my room, not before kissing my dearest darling Marian, and lay down upon my sofa for five hours. What a day! In the evening I played upon the piano, a quite dif......more

Goodreads review by Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ on October 11, 2019

"I am thinking," he remarked quietly, "whether I shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace."Written in 1859-60 by William "Wilkie" Collins and originally published in serial form in Charles Dickens' magazine (Wilkie and Charles were good friends), The Woman......more