SOURCE: “Wilkie Collins and Surplus Women: The Case of Marian Halcombe,” in Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 20, 1992, pp. 197-215.

In the following essay, Balée sees The Woman in White as a “subversion of Victorian sexual stereotypes.”

Can you look at Miss Halcombe and not see that she has the foresight and resolution of a man?

Count Fosco in The Woman in White

… The very dust of literature is precious, and its dross may be of more worth to the historian than its beaten gold.

E. S. Dallas, Blackwood's, 1859

Fiction forsooth! It is at the core of all the truths of this world; for it is the truth of life itself.

Dinah Mulock (Craik), Macmillan's, 1861

Wilkie Collins's best-selling novel, The Woman in White, first appeared in the 26 November 1859 edition of Charles Dickens's popular periodical, All the Year Round. For the space of a page—page 95—Dickens's latest novel...