It's hard to do any justice to the plot of this 500+ page novel in (and to avoid any spoilers) in a summary, so I'll just encourage anyone with a love for Victorian sensationalism to dig in. This technique helps highlight Collins' knack for creating characters with unique voices, while also letting certain unreliable narrators be as unreliable as they want without an omniscient narrator stepping in to straighten things out. Collins tells his story as a kind of a legal disposition with characters stepping into to tell their memories or share their diary entries surrounding the tragic and compelling story of Anne Catherick, the woman in white herself, and Laura Fairlie, a wealthy and innocent young woman who bears a strong resemblance to Anne. And I'm here to tell you that it holds up! This story of greed, chance, look-alikes, madness, forgery, complicated British inheritance laws, thwarted love, murder, and a couple of truly amazingly drawn Italians (one good, one so wonderfully bad) is just as much of a page turner 160 years after its publication. It's easy to think that cultural sensations like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter are unique to 21st century life, but The Woman in White, a serialized Victorian novel published in 1860 was just as much of a cultural phenomenon in its day.
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