Girl in a Blue Dress - Brossura

Arnold, Gaynor

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0771007876 ISBN 13: 9780771007873

Casa editrice: Emblem Editions, 2010

Riassunto

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.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

“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 surprising.... Arnold's easily recognizable reworking of Charles is Alfred Gibson, a literary genius with immense energy and charm.”
— Winnipeg Free Press
From the Hardcover edition.

L'autore:

Gaynor Arnold was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales. She read English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, where she acted in many plays, notably at the Edinburgh Festival and in a tour of the U.S. She has two grown children and lives in Birmingham. Girl in a Blue Dress is her first novel.
From the Hardcover edition.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Emblem Editions
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0771007876
• ISBN 13: 9780771007873
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 432