The Book: Girl in a Blue Dress: A Novel Inspired by the Life & Marriage of Charles Dickens, by Gaynor Arnold

The Story: The book is inspired by the life of Charles Dickens and his wife, however all of the names have been changed in the book.  Alfred and Dorothea Gibbons are the characters names who are supposed to be Charles and Katherine Dickens.

The story begins the day after the death of Alfred.   It is told from the point of view of Dorothea, his estranged wife.  She didn’t go to the funeral, but is left at home dealing with her grief.  Because of a lot of issues within the marriage, they have not lived together or seen each other for the past ten years.  In that time, she has also been cut out of the lives of all of her children except her oldest daughter.  The basis of the story is Dorothea reflecting on her life with Alfred while dealing with the reality that he is gone.

During the course of the book, Dorothea (who, annoyingly, is nicknamed Dodo) starts digging into the reasons for Alfred losing interest in her and confronting it for the first time.  She sees some of her children for the first time, visits the home that they shared, and went to see the women everyone suspected to be Alfred’s mistress.  By doing this, she gets a clearer view of who her husband was in the last ten years of her life.

There are a lot of side issues being explored: their parenting techniques, a lot of money issues, how they deal with in-laws, the death of children, and just the way that women of the time were treated.

Overall, the book really presents Alfred (Charles Dickens) as someone who was passionate, but often to the point of being reckless.  While he was great and creative and brilliant, his switch flipped as fast as you can imagine and he tended to leave people behind who couldn’t keep up- even if that happened to be his wife.

What I Thought: I think that a good historical fiction novel should make you curious about what actually happened, and that was the case with this one.  Several times while I was reading I sat the book down to come Google something or find out more information.  Now that I’m done, I’d love to read an actual biography of Charles Dickens because his life just seems so interesting.

It says in the author info that this is Gaynor Arnold’s first novel, and I have to say that I am really impressed.  Not only did tons of research go into this book, it was written beautifully.  I feel like she really got into the mind of Katherine Dickens and portrayed so well a woman’s thoughts.  I felt like she and her children and everyone that she came into contact with were just so real.  I liked that the Dorothea that we met on the first page of the novel and the one that we left on the last were almost different women.  It was really empowering to watch her go from a scared recluse to standing up to people and to having dinner with her children.

I really enjoyed the parallels between the characters and Dickens life. I think the fact that I’ve not read any books by him made me miss a lot of references, but I could tell that the characters that he was writing also paralleled Dickens’ characters.  Somehow she pulled all of this off without it being too over-the-top.

Conclusion: Fans of historical fiction or that “old England” time period will eat this up. It was a well written, well thought out, well researched book that will make you want to know more.