Girl in a Blue Dress (English)

Alfred Gibson, England's most famous author, is dead, and the streets throng with his mourners, but his wife Dorothea has not been invited to the funeral--Alfred banished her from his life years ago. Now, she sits reminiscing about their life together, his youthful exuberance, his courtship of Dorothea (his "girl in a blue dress"), his ever-increasing zeal for writing and public fame, and the events (including many mistresses) that led up to their estrangement. Gaynor Arnold's first novel, GIRL IN A BLUE DRESS, is a clearly based on the life of Charles Dickens, and is written in a wonderful Victorian style, full of vivid characters and dramatic set-pieces, though infused in the style of many recent historical novels and biographies with a new attentiveness to the significant yet marginalized role of women in the lives of the world's "great men." minimize