The Woman in White is based squarely upon real events and Collins strives throughout the novel,with remarkable succes, for verosimilitud.

Collins´s claim in his preface of 1860, that the method of narration he uses in The Woman in White is enterely new is not completely accurate. True, Collins novel antedates Browning´s use of a similar method in The Ring and the Book(1868-9) by almost a decade yet, just over a decade earlier, a similar narrative method was used by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847).Perhaps this method reflects the inspiration Collins receive from his source, the old eighteenth-century court case, but it almost certainly reveals,also, the influence of the sensational trials of mid-Victorian England,all the more dramatic in that they were reported verbatim in the newspapers and frequently illustrated.

Collins refers in the novel to one of these cases, the notorious Manning affair.No doubt too, though his interest in amateur theatricals and the plays he wrote for the Dickens circle.There is further advantages which Collins gained from his use of narrative method. Thus the limited viewpoints, as commentators from one of the book´s earliest reviewers onwards have pointed out, enable the author to sustain the mystery and suspense; through this is also aided by the series of interwoven secrets; instead of a single mystery, which Collins´s novel steadily unravels.Again as Collins indicates in the preface of 1860, the narrative method"has forced me to keep the story constantly moving forward; and it has afforced my characters a new opportunity of expressing themselves, through the medium of the written contributions which they are supposed to make to the progrss of the narrative"

The Woman in White is a novel with two heroines and two villains, though we shall see in a moment why there is a single hero. Even the most complex of literary characters, Hamlet or Raskolnikov for example, is highly selective picture of personality; and in literature we frequently find segments of human personality rather than complete characters in the realistic sense. An age of divided beings, such as the Victorian, encourages the tendency towards the fragmentation of characters in literature; but the tendency of the great writer towards wholeness produces both a reflaction on his own age a counter-movement.

Certainly Collins´s characters and some of their basic situations can be traced back the conventions of over half a century of melodrama. The persecution and incarceration of the heroine goes back to the dungeon motif in the Gothic strand in popular melodrama.

The Woman in White is not simply a great mystery story. It is also a novel of a very high order which chooses the world of crime and mystery as its legitimate domain.