Audiobook · read by volunteers
Woman in White
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)
Read by Tim Bulkeley (1948-2019), Ezwa, Alan Chant, Kirsten Ferreri, Melissa, Ruth Golding, Glen Hallstrom, David Barnes, Julie Bynum, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023) · 38 chapters · 25 h 34
About the book
A lonely road near London, late at night. A young drawing master meets a woman dressed all in white, who asks him the way and seems to be fleeing from something. He thinks no more of it until he reaches his new post and finds that the woman haunts the family he is to serve. A beautiful heiress, her clever half-sister, a baronet with secrets and a charming Italian count who dotes on his white mice become entangled in a story of identity, inheritance and fear. Wilkie Collins tells it through the voices of several narrators, each adding a piece to the puzzle. It is one of the great sensation novels of the Victorian age, and still a gripping read. Thirty-eight parts, close to twenty-six hours, and a mystery that keeps you guessing.
Introduction
Wilkie Collins was born in 1824 and died in 1889. He was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens and one of the most popular English novelists of his day. The Woman in White was serialised in 1859 and 1860 and first published as a book in 1860, and it brought him instant fame.
It is considered by many to be among the first mystery novels, and it is widely regarded as one of the first and finest of the so-called sensation novels, a Victorian genre that mixed domestic settings with crime, secrets and suspense. It is also an early example of a type of narrative that Collins made his own, in which several characters in turn take up the telling of the story. This creates a complex web in which readers are unsure whom to trust, and it gives the novel a documentary air, as if the events were being assembled for a court of law.
The book is divided into three main parts, called epochs, and in this recording the chapters are grouped under the narrator in charge. The volunteers of LibriVox share the reading, and several voices take the parts of the various witnesses. The whole runs to almost twenty-six hours.
Why listen now? Because the novel is a masterclass in suspense and structure. It has a menacing villain, a memorable heroine and a plot that works like clockwork. It also asks questions about the legal position of women in marriage that were very much in the air when it was written.
Public domain
Wilkie Collins died in 1889: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text