Verifiable secret sharing (VSS) is a very important tool in cryptography and information security. Many threshold VSS schemes are available in the literature, but only a little attention has been paid to general VSS. In this paper, the problem of general verifiable secret sharing is considered. Based on a general secret sharing scheme, Feldman's VSS scheme is extended to the case of arbitrary monotone access structures. A secure and efficient general VSS protocol is proposed. The newly proposed protocol is non-interactive, and has the best information rate. It may have practical applications in many areas, such as key escrow, group oriented cryptography, and fault-tolerant secure computation etc.