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Summary
Summary
At the end of her life, Catherine, the cast-off wife of Charles Dickens, gave the letters she had received from her husband to their daughter Kate, asking her to donate them to the British Museum, "so the world may know that he loved me once." The incredible vulnerability and heartache evident beneath the surface of this remark inspired Gaynor Arnold to write Girl in a Blue Dress , a dazzling debut novel inspired by the life of this tragic yet devoted woman. Arnold brings the spirit of Catherine Dickens to life in the form of Dorothea "Dodo" Gibson-a woman who is doomed to live in the shadow of her husband, Alfred, the most celebrated author in the Victorian world.
The story opens on the day of Alfred's funeral. Dorothea is not among the throngs in attendance when The One and Only is laid to rest. Her mourning must take place within the walls of her modest apartment, a parting gift from Alfred as he ushered her out of their shared home and his life more than a decade earlier. Even her own children, save her outspoken daughter Kitty, are not there to offer her comfort-they were poisoned against her when Alfred publicly declared her an unfit wife and mother. Though she refuses to don the proper mourning attire, Dodo cannot bring herself to demonize her late husband, something that comes all too easily to Kitty.
Instead, she reflects on their time together-their clandestine and passionate courtship, when he was a force of nature and she a willing follower; and the salad days of their marriage, before too many children sapped her vitality and his interest. She uncovers the frighteningly hypnotic power of the celebrity author she married. Now liberated from his hold on her, Dodo finds the courage to face her adult children, the sister who betrayed her, and the charming actress who claimed her husband's love and left her heart aching.
A sweeping tale of love and loss that was long-listed for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, Girl in a Blue Dress is both an intimate peek at the woman who was behind one of literature's most esteemed men and a fascinating rumination on marriage that will resonate across centuries.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
GAYNOR ARNOLD is a first-time novelist who lives in England.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Arnold's accomplished debut is a fictionalized take on the tumultuous marriage of Charles and Catherine Dickens. On the day of famed writer Alfred Gibson's public funeral, his estranged widow, Dorothea (Dodo), sits alone in her small London apartment, reminiscing about "the One and Only." Although caring deeply about his public image as a family man, Alfred's actual relationship with his brood is fraught by his egomaniacal demands and philandering, his career eclipsing everything else. Dodo wishes she could climb onto the page, become one of her husband's protagonists and cajole him to pay attention to her. After years of marriage, Alfred casts Dodo out of the family home after taking up with a mistress, publicly shaming her, and admonishing their children not to visit her. After Alfred's death, Dodo grapples with the choice of emerging from her self-imposed exile or remaining in seclusion without facing the public who revered him. Arnold's impeccable research paints an entirely different portrait of Dickens than that assumed by readers of his fiction. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Drawing on the life and the discontented marriage of Charles Dickens for inspiration, Arnold paints a vivid portrait of a celebrated Victorian author and his unfailingly devoted wife. When beautiful, well-heeled Dorothea Dodo Millar defies her beloved parents in order to marry aspiring writer Alfred Gibson, she gives up more than her comfortable home: she irrevocably binds herself to a genius whose ego constantly fed by an adoring public is boundless. Twenty years and eight children later, the world is shocked when revered family man and wildly popular author Alfred abruptly severs ties with Dodo and unceremoniously sends her packing. Though she remains loyal to her husband for 10 lonely years after her painful public humiliation, Dodo uses the occasion of his death to reflect back on her years with the self-termed One and Only. What she eventually learns about Alfred and, most of all, about herself provides her with an unexpected and rewarding sense of self-empowerment. Already a best-seller in England, this fictional spin on a famous marriage should find a ready-made audience in historical fiction fans and Dickens buffs.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A novel seen through the eyes of a thinly disguised Mrs. Dickens, banished by her husband. DICKENS lovers are having a great year. It has already brought two thrillers built around his unfinished "Mystery of Edwin Drood," in addition to a trim novel by Richard Flanagan, who contrasts the emotional life of Dickens with that of a young Tasmanian aboriginal girl. And now, in her first novel, "Girl in a Blue Dress," Gaynor Arnold has taken inspiration from Dickens's failed marriage, as seen through the eyes of his droopy, plangent, but remarkably good-hearted wife. Arnold recasts Dickens as the flamboyant Alfred Gibson, a manically prolific writer, mercurial family man and amateur hypnotist - all qualities shared by his real-life counterpart - who harbors a weakness for those young ladies in blue frocks. His eventual wife, Dorothea (nicknamed Dodo), dons one to win his heart; unfortunately, some years later an actress called Miss Ricketts favors an outfit of similar hue. What happens afterward leads Dorothea to provide her daughter - and the reader - an engrossing if occasionally languorous meditation on marriage, womanhood, genius and grief, all played out in a teeming milieu of characters drawn from life and literature. Dorothea's narrative opens as the streets of Victorian London go black, with readers mourning the death of their favorite author, the self-styled "One and Only" and "Great Original." Consigned to a "wretched" apartment and all but forgotten, she has not been invited to the funeral; instead, she stays home to play her piano, striking the notes through a veil of tears. She was once the adoring if weary support for Alfred's talents, but when he fell under the sway of his new love (and distaste for his wife's increasing bulk and growing brood), he banished Dorothea from the house - retaining her younger sister, Sissy, as housekeeper, child minder and (so it was rumored) lover. Even more humiliatingly, he took out a newspaper ad to announce that for some time his wife had been unsatisfactory - detached, ill, uninterested in motherhood or running a household - and that their separation was necessary for his own well-being and that of the children. For the past decade, Dorothea has barely left her apartment, and she has seen only one of their eight offspring. Still devoted, she has bided her time reading and rereading her husband's novels, rehearsing her memories, growing fatter by the day. Baroque as this back story sounds, it is based on the Dickenses' actual lives. Indeed, Arnold draws on the surviving correspondence that Catherine Dickens wanted preserved in the British Museum so "the world may know he loved me once." Clearly Mrs. Dickens, like her husband, had an investment in public opinion. Drawing on her own background as a social worker, Arnold picks apart domestic psychology as efficiently as a housemaid cleaning a coal stove. Dorothea presents herself as a victim but forestalls accusations of self-indulgence by blaming herself as much as she does her husband. Even as she describes Alfred's cruelty, she acknowledges her own flaws and declares, "He gave me everything I have valued." The sections in which she 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. Although Arnold rarely falls into the trap of imitating Dickens's style, the novel's most memorable passages are gothic - or would be if Dorothea's mind worked that way. When her sister Alice dies a sudden and unexplained death in Alfred's arms, he sobs over her body like a lover: "Oh, my darling girl! Please don't leave me." (This bit is also taken from history; one of Catherine Dickens's sisters died unexpectedly, and Charles mourned her for the rest of his days.) Fettered as Dorothea's life may be while Alfred is alive, on the day of his funeral it begins to unfurl. More of the children arrive on her doorstep, and she visits the old marital home to plead with Sissy for funds that will save a flighty daughter and spendthrift son-in-law from the poorhouse. Invited to tea with Queen Victoria, she accepts a ride to Buckingham Palace from Alfred's best friend, who may have more than a friendly interest in the new widow. Those who hope that Dorothea might open her heart to love again probably cherished a similar expectation for Dickens's Miss Havisham. Those who hope for a fiery confrontation with Alfred's actress paramour, Miss Ricketts, stand less chance of disappointment. Throughout, Arnold deftly but unobtrusively evokes Dorothea's world, from the smell of clothes freshly dyed black to the unwelcome ubiquity of seed cake on the tea table. Dickens aficionados will delight in winky references to his novels, as well as to his biography: Jenny Wren of "Our Mutual Friend" lends a nickname to Miss Ricketts; Alfred's brother's name is Sydney (as in Carton) ; and the One and Only's death has left a "Drood"-like novel unfinished, occasioning wild speculation about its conclusion. All this allusiveness can induce a dizzy feeling; it's unsettling to read about a Victorian literary scene dominated not by Dickens but by someone just like him. Given the clear commonalities in the stories, and the "inspired by" line on the cover, why not simply write about the Dickenses? Perhaps this explains it: The relatively scant liberties Arnold takes with history allow her to gesture toward a feminist ending, although the feminism is appropriately limited and relies on a deus ex machina that might work in one of Gibson's/Dickens's stories but doesn't seem quite suited to Dorothea's more prosaic view of the world. Perhaps she has a bit of the gothic in her after all. Wilkie Collins once wrote playfully of a thinly fictionalized Dickens, "A man who can do nothing by halves seems to me a fearful man." In Arnold's best-of-times, worst-of-times account, Dorothea goes whole hog, proving that husband and wife may have been a good match after all - one partner dangerously talented, one pathologically devoted, both longing for a happiness that could only be imagined. Susann Cokal is the author of the novels "Mirabilis" and "Breath and Bones."
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-On her deathbed, Catherine Dickens gave her daughter the letters from her late ex-husband so that "the world may know he loved me once." In this version of their story, Dodo (Catherine) reminisces about her life with "the One and Only" following the very public spectacle of his funeral. A believable portrait grounded firmly in Dickens's personal history. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Engrossing examination of the life and failed marriage of a hugely popular Victorian novelist (read: Charles Dickens). Arnold's confident debut offers a sympathetic, intensely readable account of the mixed blessings of living with a vast, restless and charismatic talent destined to become a national institution. Alfred Gibson is a playful but penniless actor/playwright/legal clerk when he meets unworldly Dorothea Millar, daughter of a benefactor. But he is a man full of energy, charm and humor, a workaholic whose undying fear is of returning to poverty, and whose ceaseless writing will eventually transform him into "the One and Only," a celebrity beloved by and in thrall to the Public. Dorothea, initially dazzled by Alfred, sinks slowly into disenchantment, growing stouter but feebler through eight pregnancies, gradually frozen out of the marriage by her passivity, weak health and social shortcomings. Narrated by Dorothea after Alfred's death, the novel reveals how she was bullied by her husband, who increasingly lavished his affections on younger, slimmer, more childlike women (much like her sister Alice, whose premature death Alfred mourned with inappropriate fervor). Finally, he forced her to sign a separation agreement, and ten years of isolation followed. But the Great Man's death marks a turning point, with Dorothea reconnecting to her estranged family and coming to terms with Alfred's character. Drawn out and indicative of sudden changes in its heroine, this last section is the weakest in an otherwise appealing novel. Humane and plausible. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
"From very early on in our marriage it seemed as though I could possess only what the world had left behind--the cuffs and coattails of his existence." In this impressive debut, Arnold explores the roles of marriage, motherhood, and celebrity in Victorian England. As the country mourns the passing of beloved writer Alfred Gibson, his wife remains secluded in her home, unwelcome at his funeral. Dorothea Gibson, who once traveled throughout Europe and America as her celebrated husband's muse, now lives the life of a recluse, long estranged from Alfred and most of her adult children. Dorothea begins to reflect on her life with the brilliant and charismatic but undeniably flawed artist and to contemplate the choices that pushed their relationship toward its decline. VERDICT Told in flashbacks, this debut by a middle-aged British social worker takes an intimate, unflinching look at a marriage, one that will leave readers shifting uncomfortably in their chairs even as their eyes remain riveted to the pages. Inspired by the life of Catherine Dickens, it was long-listed for the 2009 Man Booker Prize after its 2008 UK publication. [This was a pick at BookExpo 2009's Librarians' Book Shout and Share program.--Ed.]--Makiia Lucier, Moscow, ID (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 My husband's funeral is today. And I'm sitting here alone in my upstairs room while half of London follows him to his grave. I should be angry, I suppose. Kitty was angry enough for both of us, marching about the room in a demented fashion. They couldn't stop you, she kept saying. They wouldn't dare turn you away--not his own widow. And of course she was right; if I'd made an appearance, they would have been forced to acknowledge me, to grit their teeth and make the best of it. But I really couldn't have borne to parade myself in front of them, to sit in a black dress in a black carriage listening to the sound of muffled hooves and the agonized weeping of thousands. And most of all, I couldn't have borne to see Alfred boxed up in that dreadful fashion. Even today, I cannot believe that he will never again make a comical face, or laugh immoderately at some joke, or racket about in his old facetious way. All morning I have waited, sitting at the piano in my brightest frock, playing "The Sailors' Hornpipe" over and over again. The tears keep welling from my eyes every time I try to sing the words. But I carry on pounding the keys, and in the end my fingers ache almost as much as my heart. At last, the doorbell rings, and in seconds Kitty is in the room. She has an immense black veil, a heavy train running for yards behind her, and jet beads glittering all over. "Oh, you should have been there, Mama!" she cries, almost knocking Gyp from my lap with the force of her embrace. "It's completely insupportable that you were not!" I pat whatever part of her I can feel beneath the heavy folds of crepe and bombazine. I try to calm her, though now she is here--so strung up and full of grief, so pregnant with desire to tell me all--I am far from being calm myself. My heart jitters and jumps like a mad thing. I dread to hear what she has to say, but I know of old that she will not be stopped. She is near to stifling me, too; her arms are tight, her veil is across my mouth. "Please, Kitty," I gasp, "You will suffocate us both! Sit down and gather yourself a little." But she does not sit down. On the contrary, she stands up, starts to wrench off her gloves. "Sit down, Mama? How can I sit down after all I have been through? Oh, he might almost have done it on purpose!" "On purpose? Who? Your father?" I look at her with amazement. What can she mean? What can Alfred possibly have done now? What mayhem could he possibly have caused from beyond the grave? Yet at the same time, my heart quickens with dismay. Alfred always hated funerals, and would not be averse to undermining his own in some preposterous way. "Oh, Mama!" She throws her mangled gloves on the table. "As if it's not enough that we 've had to share every scrap of him with his Public for all these years, but no, they had to be center stage even today, as if it were their father--or their husband--who had been taken from them!" She lifts her veil, revealing reddened eyes and cheeks puffed with weeping. So it is only his Public she inveighs against; nothing more sinister. "Oh, Kitty," I say. "It is hard, I know, but you must allow his readers their hour of grief." "Must I? Really, Mama, must I?" She takes out her handkerchief. It is silk with a black lace border and I cannot help thinking that she must have outspent her housekeeping with all this ostentation. She dabs at her eyes as violently as if she would poke them out. "You'd have expected, wouldn't you, that after giving them every ounce of his blood every day of his existence, at least they'd let him have some peace and dignity at the end?" Excerpted from Girl in a Blue Dress: A Novel Inspired by the Life and Marriage of Charles Dickens by Gaynor Arnold All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
