The celebrated debut novel inspired by the life and marriage of Charles Dickens
Alfred Gibson's funeral is taking place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. The Great Man's will favours his children and a clandestine mistress over the woman he sent away when their youngest child was still an infant.
Dorothea hasn't left her small apartment for years, and accepts her exclusion until an invitation to a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives. The exhilaration of finding that she has much in common with the most powerful woman in England spurs Dorothea to examine her own life more closely. Her recollections uncover deviousness and the frighteningly hypnotic power of the genius she married, but also raise questions about her own complicity in her unhappiness. Questions that finally compel her to face her grown-up children and the two women she has long felt stole her husband: her own younger sister, Sissy, and the charming actress, Miss Ricketts.
This remarkable debut is as wise in the ways of the human heart as it is witty and vivid in its depiction of the charismatic Alfred Gibson, and the habits, mores, and personalities of Victorian London.
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
This juicy novel imagines the private life of a famous couple: Catherine and Charles Dickens. Arnold sticks close to the Dickens' life story but changes all the names. Smart readers will connect the dots.
People magazine
Wonderful. Arnold's knowledge of Dickens is impeccable. Beautifully written, entirely satisfying.
The Times
Fabulously indulgent Victoriana. A lovely, rich evocation of the period [with] complex characterisation and silky prose.
The Observer
Arnold's portrayal of Gibson/Dickens is spot-on.
*The Guardian
Fascinating. A moving story about the special burden of loving a universally adored man. [What] Arnold handles so effectively, is portraying the intermingling of love and resentment, affection and pettiness, that renders any marriage mysterious to outsiders. Washington Post
Arnold picks apart domestic psychology as efficiently as a housemaid cleaning a coal stove. The sections in which [Dodo] recollects their years together pulse with the excitement of a secret courtship and a highly erotic early married life, as well as the anxieties of a woman increasingly exhausted by the arrival of child after child. Dickens aficionados will delight in winky references to his novels, as well as to his biography. New York Times Book Review
Arnold's achievement, in constructing a busy, engaging, above-all empathetic fiction on the foundation of facts, is considerable. Gibson emerges as a monster of a kind, narcissistic and voracious, yet his gaiety, inventiveness and magnetism shine off the page. Miami Herald
*Readers interested in the life of Charles Dickens will find [Girl in a Blue Dress] engaging and surpris...
About the Author
Gaynor Arnold is the author of Lying Together and Girl in a Blue Dress, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2009, and The Orange Broadband Prize in 2009.