Book Review: Girl in a Blue Dress
Gaynor Arnold’s Debut is Booker Long-listed
Dorothea Gibson sits at home, refusing to wear black, whilst the rest of London mourns her husband. His funeral is a national event, throngs of people lining the streets as mass grief and hysteria sweep the capital. Alfred Gibson was their novelist, their property, their One and Only, the Great Man.
Yet Dorothea, kicked out of the marital home for a young actress after bearing Alfred eight children, knows a very different side to this greatest of public figures. In the days following his death, she remembers the giddy, breathless early days of their relationship, and considers how she really feels about him now, after all that has happened.
A Meeting with Queen Victoria
The action alternates between the past and the present, as Dorothea’s life begins to take shape again after ten years of living in solitude. She is summoned to take tea with Queen Victoria, herself a widow, and even travels to the home of Wilhelmina Ricketts, the young woman whom she blames for the breakdown of her marriage.
The novel moves towards a happy ending, as Dorothea is gradually re-united with friends and family, but the underlying tone is one of sadness: despite his actions, she will always love Alfred, a man with the capacity to charm all he meets. She remembers how she contrived to impress him, wearing “a blue dress which showed off my bosom to advantage”, and how happy they were until his growing fame and a series of pregnancies came between them.
In these celebrity-obsessed times, Dorothea’s loneliness at having to share her husband with an adoring public is poignant. When he moves out of the marital bedroom, her sorrow is absolute: “bedtime was for me the only part of the day when I felt my husband was truly mine; when he did not belong to his friends, his readers or the entire population of England.”
Catherine Dickens finds a Voice
The bare bones of the story are, of course, based on the life of Charles Dickens, with Dorothea taking up the role of Dickens’ dispossessed wife Catherine. Until now, Catherine’s story has been largely untold, and this novel goes a long way towards redressing that wrong, despite the author’s protestations that she has taken “a novelist’s liberties” with the facts.
Alfred Gibson does indeed emerge from the novel as an irresistibly charismatic figure, but the strongest sections of the book are Dorothea’s meetings with other women: her usurping sister Sissy, Queen Victoria, Wilhelmina Ricketts. Above all, when Dorothea sits down at the end of the novel, her pen poised to take over where her husband left off, we see a woman ready to step out from behind the Great Man’s shadow and tell her own tale at last.
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold is published in the UK by Tindal Street Press (2008), 438 pages, ISBN 978-0-9556476-1-1, and has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008.
Cover of Girl in a Blue Dress
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