Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White relates, at least according to its Preamble, a story of events that “might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice,” but which “is left to be told for the first time in this place.” The pages of the novel are constructed as an alternative forum for an inquiry into a crime and a proclamation of right that cannot be pursued through the courts. The novel represents itself as an intervention in the public sphere, more particularly as a supplement to the law, going where it cannot go, but performing a similar function. Justice is the story's end, in both senses of that word; and it is a justice that restores the heroine to her rightful position in society, a justice that fulfils the law. Thus, while the Preamble acknowledges the limitations of the law, it also invokes the standards of legal proof in order to tell, and indeed to validate, its story: