The Woman in White

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. On a moonlit London night, art teacher Walter Hartwright meets a young woman - beautiful, terrified and dressed entirely white - alone on the street. Compelled to help this piteous creature, he finds himself caught up in a world of secrets, murder and madness, with an impossible mystery to solve. The odds seem stacked against him, but a sleuthing partnership with the brilliantly clever Marian Halcombe may be just enough to outwit their formidable nemesis - the menacing Count Fosco. One of the great mystery thrillers of the nineteenth century and beyond, The Woman in White is a wonderful combination of rich characterisation and cunning melodrama that ensnares the reader from the very first page. This beautiful Macmillan Collector's Library edition of The Woman in White features an afterword by writer, editor and playwright David Stuart Davies.

William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of a successful and popular painter. Collins himself demonstrated some artistic talent and had a painting hung in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1849, but his real passion was for writing. On leaving school, he worked in the office of a tea merchant in the Strand but hated it. He left and read law as a student at Lincoln's Inn but already his writing career was flowering. His first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. In 1851, the same year that he was called to the bar, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens. While Collins' fame rests on his best known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he wrote over thirty books, as well as numerous short stories, articles and plays. He was a hugely popular writer in his lifetime. Collins was an unconventional individual: he never married but established long term liaisons with two separate households. He died in 1889.