I begin this chapter by returning to Anne and Walter's confrontation in The Woman in White. At the moment that Anne touches him, Walter is ‘idly wondering … what the Cumberland young ladies would look like’ (20). Even before Walter and the reader come to learn that Anne and Laura are half-sisters and pawns in the hands of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde, the women are aligned in the same bewildering moment, as Anne's touch and Walter's imagined image of Laura arrest his senses at once. The next evening, when Walter tries to fall asleep in Limmeridge House, he asks, ‘What shall I see in my dreams to-night … the woman in white? or the unknown inhabitants of this Cumberland mansion?’ (30). As Cvetkovich observes, the ‘memory of Anne is mingled with his anticipation of the other women’ (Mixed Feelings 82). Walter's role in the doubling plot of Anne and Laura is significant: he identifies their likeness and works to right the wrongs of the other men in the novel. A number of critics have suggested that this novel is as much a narrative of Walter's manhood gained as it is Laura's identity restored. Yet to emphasise Walter's role in the novel is to risk missing the relationship developed between the women, specifically that between Laura and Anne, which has received less attention than the intense sisterly bond between Laura and Marian. In fact, Anne has another significant sensational confrontation in the novel when she finds Laura at the boathouse, and surprises her much as she surprised Walter. For Laura, looking at Anne is like looking at ‘my own face in the glass after a long illness’ (282).

In many ways, for Laura, confronting the illegitimate, ‘dazed’ Anne is a confrontation with her sensational self (282). Their relationship calls to mind anxieties associated with sensational and immersive reading practices. As I have noted in earlier chapters, reviewers articulated concerns that young women reading sensation novels would be unable to distinguish between fiction and reality, and between their own desires and those of sensational heroines. Implied in such anxieties about sensational reading was the exaggerated notion that women readers might somehow become the characters about whom they read.