The Woman in White

On a moonlit road outside London, a drawing teacher named Walter Hartright meets a woman dressed all in white, distressed, alone, and, he soon learns, escaped from an asylum. Days later he takes a post at Limmeridge House and meets his new pupil, Laura Fairlie, who resembles the vanished stranger to an unsettling degree. Laura is engaged to the charming Sir Percival Glyde, and around that engagement Wilkie Collins builds one of the great plots in English fiction: a conspiracy involving identity, inheritance, and one of literature's most magnificent villains, the vast, canary-loving, endlessly courteous Count Fosco.

Collins tells the story through successive narrators (each witness picks up the tale where the last left off, like testimony at a trial) a structure that makes the audiobook feel like a documentary assembled in your ears. And standing against the conspiracy is Marian Halcombe, plain, brilliant, and fearless, one of the best heroines of the Victorian age. This is the book that invented the 'sensation novel,' and it has lost none of its grip.

At roughly 236,600 words, The Woman in White runs about 26½ hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The Woman in White is in the public domain, so the complete text is free on Project Gutenberg and LoudReader has the entire Project Gutenberg catalog built in. To listen:

1. Download LoudReader for Mac or iPhone (free, no account).
2. Search for “The Woman in White” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

LoudReader reads with natural offline voices, so the whole book works on a plane or underground. It is fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device. Listening is unlimited on the free tier.