This was a world that was suddenly in flux and full of anxiety about the changes underway. It emerged out of gothic fiction, influenced also by the lurid real-life crime stories written up in the Newgate Calendar and by stage melodrama.

The sensation genre appealed to all classes with unique force. In 1863 in the Quarterly Review, Henry Mansel (a Professor at Oxford who would later become Dean of St Paul’s) intoned that the “morbid” genre of sensation novels was an indication of “a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and cause”. Literary critics and moral leaders responded with alarm and disapproval. These stories were all the more shocking for readers because novelists drew on the fearful thrills and tricks of contemporary theatre’s “sensation drama”.

Crimes of incarceration and fraud, adultery and bigamy all occur within the anxiously sacrosanct setting of the family home. Sensation novels play out nightmarish scenarios of duplicity and deception, but part of their astonishing fervour is in how they over-compensate for the incoherence surrounding them in their depictions of idealised coupledom and family life. Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and arguably encompassed Dickens’ Great Expectations and pushed forward to influence George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Whistler’s ethereal red-haired beauty would also have found a receptive audience among consumers of Woman in White perfume and dancers of the Woman in White waltz.Ĭollins’ novel, serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round, was the first mega success in the new genre of sensation novels. And she captured the public imagination enough to spawn embodied counterparts in stage adaptations (painter Frederick Walker created the poster for an 1871 play). This is Anne Catherick, a fugitive from a mental asylum who knows a secret about the husband of the woman the narrator will soon fall in love with.

She first appears to the narrator as an “extraordinary apparition”, “dressed from head to foot in white garments”, who seems “as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from heaven”. The archetype was the titular character of Wilkie Collins’ phenomenally successful novel of 1859–60. When James McNeill Whistler’s life-size portrait of his lover Joanna Hiffernan was advertised to Londoners as an “Extraordinary Picture the WOMAN IN WHITE” in 1862, it entered a world already thronging with women in white. Her books include Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury). Lara Feigel is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London. From the Spring 2022 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

The woman inwhite