The Woman in White

⚖The case for it

Collins's masterwork of psychological suspense: a sinister conspiracy to steal a woman's identity, a villain (Count Fosco) of extraordinary charisma, multiple narrators contributing fragments of truth. The Victorian sensation novel at its finest and the direct ancestor of the psychological thriller.

— the canon

✕The case against

Laura Fairlie, the woman the whole conspiracy turns on, is a blank: pretty, passive, interchangeable by design and by authorial neglect. Marian Halcombe, the actual heroine, gets benched by fever at the worst possible moment. At six hundred pages of serial-novel padding, the final third turns into a procedural slog of depositions. Fosco deserves a tighter book.

— the honest librarian