Girl in a Blue Dress

Today’s post is from Karen at Haggard Library:

Girl in a Blue Dress: A Novel Inspired by the Life and Marriage of Charles Dickens by Gaynor Arnold

The little-told tale of Charles Dickens’ wife is luminously brought to life in Gaynor Arnold’s debut novel.

In Victorian London, the highly acclaimed writer Alfred Gibson (who is Charles Dickens in all but name) has just died. It seems the whole of England has attended his funeral, except his long-estranged wife Dorothea. Thus the story of Dorothea begins, as we find her living in near seclusion after her home and children have been usurped by her husband and sister. Through her personal recollections, we discover the true story of her whirlwind courtship and marriage to the “One and Only.”

Arnold adeptly depicts the inner workings of the Gibson/Dickens family’s home life. She shows us a once happy marriage that becomes strained by the ordinary demands of family and child rearing, along with the unusual circumstances of fame and public notoriety.

In reality, Charles Dickens separated from his wife Catherine after ten children and over twenty years of marriage.  After the separation, he publicly vilified his wife as an inept wife and mother, and was rumored to have carried on an affair with the actress Ellen Ternan.  His wife’s dying wish was to have her husband’s letters to her given to the British Museum, “that the world may know he loved me once.”

I highly recommend this book, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. You will never read the works of Charles Dickens in the same way again.