How Is Wilkie Collins’s Life Reflected In “The Woman In White”?

This 1860 novel, which brought its author lasting fame, opens with the young Walter Hartright meeting a strange, frightened woman on a lonely road, and helping her to escape from her pursuers. It is some time before he learns her story. The event seems like pure melodrama, and yet it is based on Collins's own real-life encounter with a woman called Caroline Graves. He and Caroline lived together for many years, though they never married. At the same time Collins pursued a relationship with another woman, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. This is also echoed in "The Woman in White," where Hartwright lives with two sisters, whose opposite but complementary characters seem, in his eyes, to make a perfect whole. (of course, as this is a mid-Victorian novel, the relationship is perfectly chaste; nevertheless most readers have noticed a sexual tension in the ménage a trois.) The Woman in White continues to sell well; it has had tw

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