Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824. He studied law and, besides being a writer, he worked as a painter and an actor. He met Charles Dickens in 1851, and by then he had already published a biography of his father, a historical novel, and a travel book. That meeting would prove decisive for both men, steering their literary paths in new directions. Dickens at the time edited Household Words, a periodical that serialized novels. In 1859 he founded All the Year Round, a weekly literary magazine in which Collins contributed La mujer de blanco, a novel that belongs to the sensational subgenre. This form enjoyed great popularity in Britain, emerging from melodramatic literature and, thanks to authors like Collins, Wood, and Braddon, it solidified in such publications until the advent of novels and library lending.
Collins had previously crafted other sensational novels packed with violence and mystery focused on the middle class rather than the underworld, employing sharp narrative techniques as seen in La mujer de blanco. The work achieved immense reception and laid the foundations of the modern detective story, which many later authors imitated. In a recurring pattern in his works, the female lead is presented as a heroine conditionally shaped by circumstance, not only because she is a woman but also due to an arbitrary legal situation reflecting the legal knowledge Collins possessed.
La mujer de blanco is an epistolary serial published between 1859 and 1860. It is regarded as one of the earliest mystery novels, an early example of detective fiction in which the male protagonist becomes an actual detective whose aim is to prove the heroine’s innocence and rescue her from injustice. The narrative unfolds entirely through diaries, letters, and messages exchanged among the participants in the mystery, thus giving voice to many perspectives and discarding the omniscient narrator common to such novels.
It all begins when a wealthy man appoints Laura Fairlie as the drawing tutor for his niece and her half sister. Laura Fairlie is a rich heiress, and the romance blossoms despite her engagement to a peer. The lovers see their plans thwarted by responsibilities that force the man to travel to distant lands, while Laura ends up marrying a much older lord who soon reveals financial troubles. This lord counts among his closest friends a pair of nobles, a countess who is Laura’s aunt and a beneficiary of the family inheritance, as well as the aunt’s sister who shares a shadowy interest in the fortune. A web of secrets, encounters, and a mysterious woman dressed in white drives the plot, tightening the mesh of the narrative with every turn. Inheritance disputes, landed estates, servants, deaths, asylum, secrets, and espionage provide the requisite seasoning for this kind of storytelling, where each episode ends with a note of tension to secure readers’ follow-through.
In this work the characters meet their own antagonist while developing in pairs beside the central heroine who is fragile yet bold, a strikingly rich heiress. The author uses these paired figures to amplify each personality, weaving strength and flaw into the fabric of the narrative through contrasting voices and motives of the different characters.
Because the novel unfolds through letters, the settings of each correspondence shift with the writer. The action does not stay in one place or move in a single way. To solve the mystery, the principal figure travels across the urban setting of London and into the countryside, visiting various towns and villages. The descriptions become meticulous and vivid, with letters containing dialogues and rapid-fire exchanges that accelerate the pace and lend authenticity by mirroring the delays and interactions of real life. The theory of distant communication, both in time and space, is embodied in how the author has the narrator write from one location while readers receive the message later, at another place and moment.
Collins found in this novel a way to present the reader with a case that unfolds like a courtroom drama, inviting the reader to act as juror. This structure made the work exceptionally popular in its era and established Collins as a master of dramatic setup and impact. Dickens admired this quality and often attempted to imitate Collins in character delineation and in didactic storytelling, a mark of the influence Collins exerted on his contemporaries.