Description
Combining, romance, intrigue, and danger, Wilkie Collins’ beloved mystery novel has taken generations of readers on a thrilling ride along the corridors of English country houses, and down into the dankest, deepest corners of the Victorian madhouse. This bold new adaptation by Fiona Seres retains the creeping atmosphere that has captured the imaginations of the book’s readers for over a century, while bringing a distinctly modern take to its striking female characters, its charismatic, formidable villains, and its gripping, labyrinthine plot.
When Walter Hartright, a young drawing master, encounters a ghostly woman dressed all in white on a moonlit road on Hampstead Heath, he is drawn into a web of intrigue that will transform his life forever. Offering his assistance to this distressed, spectral woman, he is later shocked to discover that she had just escaped from a nearby insane asylum.
Shortly afterwards, Walter takes up a teaching position in the Cumbrian village of Limmeridge. There, he meets his pupils – the clever, bold Marian Halcombe, and the beautiful, sweet-natured Laura Fairlie. Walter notices that Laura bears an uncanny resemblance to the mysterious woman in white, who was known to the household as Anne Catherick: a mentally disabled child who grew up in the village. Over the next few months, Walter and Laura fall deeply in love. However, she is promised in marriage to Sir Percival Glyde, a charming local Baronet with a secret he will do anything to protect.
Soon after the wedding, Glyde’s true cruel nature begins to emerge and, along with his companion, the compelling yet Machiavellian Count Fosco, he enacts a terrible plan to access his new wife’s considerable fortune: following Anne’s death in the asylum, he exchanges the identities of the two women. Anne is buried as Laura, and Laura is committed to the madhouse. Only Marian – who locks horns with the dangerously charismatic Fosco – and Walter can rescue Laura from her grim fate, restore her identity, and expose Glyde and Fosco as the unscrupulous, scheming masterminds behind this twisted conspiracy…