<b>The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins</b>&nbsp;<i><b>The Woman in White</b></i>&nbsp;is&nbsp;Wilkie Collins&#39;s fifth published novel, written in 1859 and set from 1849 to 1850. It is a&nbsp;mystery novel&nbsp;and falls under the genre of &quot;sensation novels&quot;.<br /><br />The story can be seen as an early example of&nbsp;detective fiction&nbsp;with protagonist Walter Hartright employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives. The use of&nbsp;multiple narrators&nbsp;(including nearly all the principal characters) draws on Collins&#39;s legal training, and as he points out in his preamble: &quot;the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness&quot;.<br /><br />Collins also drew on memories of his father, the artist William Collins, in the creation of drawing master Walter Hartright, and populates his story with a number of Italian characters, likely inspired by two years spent in Italy during childhood.<br />In 2003,&nbsp;Robert McCrum&nbsp;writing for&nbsp;<i>The Observer</i>&nbsp;listed&nbsp;<i>The Woman in White</i>&nbsp;number 23 in &quot;the top 100 greatest novels of all time&quot;, and the novel was listed at number 77 on the&nbsp;BBC&#39;s survey&nbsp;The Big Read.