Girl in a Blue Dress (Hardcover) ~ Gaynor Arnold (Author) Cover Art

Girl in a Blue Dress (Hardcover)

By: Gaynor Arnold (Author)


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Review

"[A] moving story about the special burden of loving a universally adored man.... Arnold takes up Mrs. Dickens's side of the marriage, and as any divorce lawyer could predict, it's an entirely different, equally fascinating story....[T]he world's most popular writer comes off looking rather bad, but that's the easy part. The more difficult and satisfying task, which Arnold handles so effectively, is portraying the intermingling of love and resentment, affection and pettiness, that renders any marriage mysterious to outsiders."

"GIRL IN A BLUE DRESS is an entertaining attempt to imagine an aspect of Dickens's private life that remains something of a mystery."

"Arnold's achievement, in constructing a busy, engaging, above-all empathetic fiction on the foundation of facts, is considerable....In the guise of Alfred Gibson -- aka The One and Only, the Great Original -- she introduces a mercurial, charismatic writer of astonishing skill and output whose ability to charm is matched only by his ruthless self-interest."

"Throughout, Arnold deftly but unobtrusively evokes Dorothea's world, from the smell of clothes freshly dyed black to the unwelcome ubiquity of seed sake on the tea table. Dickens aficionados will delight in winky references to his novels, as well as to his biography..."

Publisher's note

Recently widowed Dorothea Gibson examines her difficult life with a late, beloved, celebrity author during Queen Victoria's reign in this novel based on the real-life troubled marriage of Charles Dickens.

Annotation

Beloved writer Alfred Gibson's funeral has all of London in tears. Yet his very own wife is not in attendance and his once-favorite daughter is begrudgingly present. Dorothea has, in fact, not been invited-estranged for years from her husband, left for a young mistress and now practically absent from his will. Living a life in recluse, she is not even in touch with seven of her children, or her sister-all of whom were turned against her by the great Gibson when he declared her publicly an unfit mother.
Yet, Dorothea cannot bring herself to demonize Alfred, choosing instead to revisit their courtship and their early days of nuptial pleasure-before the birth of too many children sapped her vitality. Now, alone, but for her feisty daughter, Kitty, she begins to rethink her life--and Alfred's will forces her to face her grown-up children, the sister who betrayed her, and the charming actress who claimed her husband's love and left her heart aching.
Intriguing Victoriana melds with the rarely heard, but captivating story of a woman who was once a great muse to one of literature's most esteemed men.

Alfred Gibson, England's most famous author, is dead, and the streets throng with his mourners, but his wife Dorothea has not been invited to the funeral--Alfred banished her from his life years ago. Now, she sits reminiscing about their life together, his youthful exuberance, his courtship of Dorothea (his "girl in a blue dress"), his ever-increasing zeal for writing and public fame, and the events (including many mistresses) that led up to their estrangement. Gaynor Arnold's first novel, GIRL IN A BLUE DRESS, is a clearly based on the life of Charles Dickens, and is written in a wonderful Victorian style, full of vivid characters and dramatic set-pieces, though infused in the style of many recent historical novels and biographies with a new attentiveness to the significant yet marginalized role of women in the lives of the world's "great men."



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