The story is related by a series of characters involved in the intrigue of Walter Hartright's meeting of an agitated woman on a lonely road at midnight. She was dressed all in white and seeks his help to escape her pursuers. Hartright worked as a drawing master and later fell in love with Laura who was strikingly like that mysterious woman in white. Yet she rejected his advances and married Sir Percival Glyde.

William Wilkie Collins was born in 1824 and died in 1889. This is a magnificent novel of sensation (crime, mystery, suspense), thought to be the first true full-length detective novel in English Literature.