'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop...There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth...stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming friend' Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Of all the classic literature books that I've been perusing lately this one is the one that appeals the most. I've heard so much about this, the first truly gothic horror novel, that I really do want to read it. I'm a little intimidated by it's size, and that it has numerous pages of appendices and notes at the back of the book. I'm not sure I'll read it right away, but it's certainly something I am looking forward to.