Many years ago, I was in crisis. As a result of university, I had come to hate reading, an experience all too familiar to those who study literature. What saved me was picking up an unfashionable Victorian novel in a bookshop: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). A short way into its opening – in which the hero Walter recounts how, returning from his mother’s cottage in Hampstead he is accosted by a terrified young woman dressed in white, assists her, then learns that she has escaped from an asylum – I was gripped. The story, filled with vivid...