NEAR the end of Emily Howes’s remarkably well-imagined, compelling, and intimate novel, Anne — the long-term maid to Mrs Kate Dickens — finally recognises a truth: that she, Kate, and indeed every member of Charles Dickens’s household have become playthings in his endless games, theatricals, and, most of all, his genius for story. When he and Kate become estranged, Dickens even attempts to erase her from the narrative.
Mrs Dickens is more than a fictional reappraisal of an overlooked historical figure. Howes’s tender treatment of Kate, which traces her story from youthful ingénue through to a late middle age in which her body bears the marks of ten children and emotional neglect, is a compelling work of reimagination and recovery. If, ostensibly, it is a novel about a literary wife, this is actually about two women negotiating an appallingly controlling, if extraordinarily gifted, man.
Anne, the maid, repeatedly betrays others, including Kate, to ensure her own comfort, and yet she never quite loses the reader’s sympathy. She may be an opportunist, but she is also full of grief. Kate lives with myopia, literal and figurative; it could readily be corrected, but seemingly she prefers to live in a blurred world. She prefers to believe her inner fantasy about Dickens rather than face the truth.
This novel could readily have resolved into a crude Charles-v.-Kate pick-a-side narrative. Howes is subtler than that. Kate’s inner life is richly textured without becoming implausible. Charles never simply becomes a cipher for modern views on gender politics. Howes reads him through the precariousness of 19th-century literary life, ensuring that Dickens is no mere monster. This is a beautiful, absorbing read, in which Kate’s survival becomes a cause for joy. When, at the novel’s close, she decides to start wearing corrective spectacles, I rejoiced. Finally, she chooses reality over comforting fantasy.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, in the diocese of Manchester.
Mrs Dickens
Emily Howes
Phoenix Books £20
(978-1-3996-1083-4)
Church Times Bookshop £18