and how – by a hair’s breadth she was reclaimed from oblivion despite strenuous efforts to keep her there’. She writes, ‘this is the story of someone who –almost- wasn’t there who vanished into thin air. Claire Tomalin’s scholarly investigations have pieced together a picture of their secret relationship despite gaps in the surviving evidence. They met when Ellen Ternan was only eighteen and Charles Dickens was forty-five and still married to Catherine Hogarth, the mother of his ten children. But how did it all begin? Why the secrecy? I doubt if he ever said ‘be kind to poor Nell’ as another illustrious Charles did at his demise, but he certainly should have done. Charles Dickens was an immensely strong personality and was determined to present only his version of himself to the world. It wasn’t the fact that he’d had a mistress as such rather it was the callous way in which he had treated his wife and the lengths to which he went to preserve his public reputation. Claire Tomalin’s story fascinated me the first time round, but the Dickens fan in me wasn’t much impressed with my literary hero I never again looked at him in the same light. I read it avidly when I first bought it in 1998 and so after lending it to a fellow book clubber I decided that it was ripe for a re-reading. Last year, after having a book group outing to listen to Claire Tomalin discussing her biography of Charles Dickens, I remembered that I had The Invisible Woman tucked away on my book shelves. The actress Ellen (Nelly) Lawless Ternan is now accepted (except perhaps by die-hard Dickensians) to have been mistress to Charles Dickens from 1857 until his death in 1870.
The Invisible Woman: The story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin Penguin Books, 1991 (new edition 2012)įor many years Nelly Ternan only existed in the shadows, if at all Claire Tomalin’s research has remedied that situation.
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