There’s a little bit of romance, but no more than there is in, for example, my own Wolf’s Head. Jamaica Inn is no bustling drinking den in a busy city, as I expected – it’s a run-down old place, with a murderous landlord whose only patrons are the occasional smugglers who eventually turn out to be much worse than our hero Mary-Ellen suspects. This is a dark book, even darker than Rebecca and, rather than a cast of dozens, only a handful of characters are ever seen. Well, it’s nothing like that (thankfully)! Those could, I suppose, be classed as “romance” novels of a sort, so I expected Jamaica Inn would be much the same – perhaps some young barmaid’s ribald adventures in the titular tavern, fending off drunken oafs and jealous older women before finding love in some unlikely place. More than a hundred years since its first publication, readers can still relate to its characters and empathize with the protagonists in the story.I bought this without even reading the synopsis because it was in a sale on Audible and I had really enjoyed this author’s other books Rebecca ( my review) and My Cousin Rachel ( review). When it was first published in 1859, The Woman in White quickly became a best-seller because of its theme and storyline. Glyde is portrayed here as an archetypical villain which every reader of this book will surely hate. In order to get her family’s riches he’s willing to resort to desperate means. In the story, Glyde was already in financial difficulties when he married Laura who was from a rich family. Glyde and his friend Count Fosco were masters of deception and they’d do everything they can to get the things they want. Laura eventually married Glyde and this is when things started to turn for the worse for the main characters in the novel. Marian advised Walter to forget his love for Laura and live their place, a painful advice which he followed. Walter and Laura eventually became very close to each other and had a relationship, but Laura was already set to marry Sir Percival Glyde. While he was in their house he discovered that the woman dressed in white whom he helped was also Laura’s sister. A day later, he travelled to Cumberland to be a drawing master to the half-sisters Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe.

The story begins with Walter Hartright helping a woman dressed in white who turned out to have escaped from a mental asylum. Like most novels that fall into this category, the protagonists here are pushed to their limits by the villains before they finally got the justice they deserved. It’s considered to be one of the first “sensation novels” to be published. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White tells the story of two half-sisters, Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe who were embroiled in the sinister plot of Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco to take over their family’s wealth.

The woman in white audiobook