Publisher's Weekly Review
In a remarkable feat of biographical sleuthing, Tomalin offers the fullest account to date of Charles Dickens's secret 13-year relationship with actress Ellen (``Nelly'') Ternan. She was perhaps 18 when the famous 45-year-old novelist made her a ``fallen woman,'' according to Tomalin, who presents a compelling case that Ternan was his mistress. He could offer neither steady companionship nor marriage, unwilling to jeopardize his virtuous public image with his Victorian readership, even after the affair apparently triggered his separation from his wife, Catherine. Tomalin, biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield, portrays a frantic Dickens slipping into self-delusion, falsely claiming that his marriage had been awful all along. After his death in 1870, Ternan, who outlived him by 44 years, married a reverend, wrote poetry, became a right-minded Victorian lady and helped maintain the secrecy surounding her association with Dickens. Besides offering a marvelous whirl through the ``disreputable'' world of the theater, Tomalin provides a new slant on Dickens as a writer uncomfortably trapped in his own conventional morality. Photos. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A resourceful and sympathetic biographer of such elusive women as Mary Woll-stonecraft and Katherine Mansfield, Tomalin here reclaims ""the little riddle,"" as Dickens called Ellen Ternan, the mistress with whom he clandestinely shared the last 13 years of his life--an especially timely publication since Peter Ackyrod's recent Dickens continues to perpetuate the Victorian myth that they were merely friends. Born into a theatrical family, Ternan joined a select group of independent, industrious, impoverished women whose irregular life-style and low reputation exiled them to the peripheries of society even as they provided models of innocence and gentility on the stage--one of the many ironies for which Tomalin has such a good eye. Protected by their mother, the Ternan sisters escaped from the theater. Fanny, the most talented, married Thomas Trollope, a writer, and became a novelist herself; Maria married an Oxford brewer, left him to become a painter and then a journalist; and Ellen, at 18, succumbed to Dickens, at 45 the most popular writer in England and the apotheosis of domestic values. After his death, she married a man 12 years her junior, ran a school, and in her 40s bore two children, concealing to the end of her life her true age, and her history as an actress and as Dickens's mistress. The last section here relates the responses of various relatives and scholars to the discovery of Ternan's papers in the 1920's and to their destruction by her son, the last ""casualty of his mother's history."" Tomalin skillfully depicts Ternan's world, the theater in 19th-century London, the domestic life of actresses, and travel. The only flaw: excessive digression on Dickens's travels, on his charitable interest in an asylum for delinquent girls, and on his novels--which Tomalin admits Ternan did not influence, a fact critics have found to be the greatest mystery of all. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In his monumental biography, Dickens [BKL D 1 90], Peter Ackroyd argues that Charles Dickens' affair with actress Ellen ("Nelly") Ternan was not sexual; Claire Tomalin, in this ground-breaking look at Ternan's heretofore hidden life, not only disagrees but believes it likely that Ternan bore at least one child by Dickens. There is no ultimate proof of either position, but what is abundantly clear is that the two were utterly devoted to one another in the years between 1857, when Dickens first met the teenage Ternan, and 1870, when the novelist died. As Tomalin stresses throughout, this devotion came at a stiff price to both parties: for Ternan, who was forced to live "a life of nervous isolation" or be exposed as that Victorian nightmare, the scarlet woman, and for Dickens, who endured the emotionally and physically torturous rigors of a split life. In portraying Ternan as a kind of feminist heroine, Tomalin finds both the injustice of the Victorian attitude toward actresses ("the assumption . . . seemed to be that the exercise of any talent by a woman in public was a form of prostitution") and an ironic counterpoint to the stereotypical treatment of women in nineteenth-century fiction. Nelly emerges ~forcefully as "the obstinate representative of all the erring women who must have kicked against the fate decreed for them in Victorian England." Perhaps Nelly would also kick at Tomalin's reluctance to see her years with Dickens as a love story. Though we have no way of knowing what Dickens and Ternan shared in private, Tomalin seems to prefer viewing her heroine as trapped in Dickens' embraces rather than relishing them. She may be right, but why not see Nelly and Charles as passionate lovers defying an age that was afraid of passion. It's much prettier that way. --Bill Ott
