Gothic Chill Meets Human Vulnerability: The Birth of the “Sensation” Nove

By Leslie Kendall Dye | Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - Off the Shelf

My obsession with Wilkie Collins started, strangely, with The Moonstone. It’s often credited with being the first “detective novel,” but it isn’t. It is considered a classic, but it’s boring and poorly plotted. I read it to please my father, who had loved it. When I told him what I thought of it, he said, “Oh, yes, I remember now, it is boring. Try The Woman in White, that’s much better.”

Indeed. I spent that year collecting and reading every Collins novel I could find. The Woman in White, while perhaps the least needing of publicity, is the best book with which to introduce Wilkie Collins to the uninitiated.

The Woman in White, published serially in Charles Dicken’s magazine All The Year Round in 1859, and then in book form in 1860, heralded the arrival of the “sensation novel.” The book was an instant smash. Indeed, since its publication, it has never been out of print.
Other authors quickly followed his lead, working from the genre’s central technique: infusing the domestic sphere with a Gothic stream of mystery, secrets, dark intentions and deep anxiety about sexuality and identity.

Collins, however, remained peerless in creating thrills and developing character. His dialogue is so crisp, his backdrops so vivid, and his pacing so suspenseful that he foreshadows an entirely new medium of storytelling: cinema.
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