671 pages
English language
Published Nov. 14, 2003 by Penguin Books.
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.
If you vowed to read a classic 19th century English-language novel you could do worse than this. Entertaining, especially the fatigued Mr Fairlie, at times gripping, if one doesn't let the stereotype sex and nationality tropes get in the way -- you can manage that I am sure. Subversive and satisfying.
