Mrs. Dickens

For readers of The Paris Wife, a vibrant and witty novel about the scandalous marriage between Charles Dickens and his overlooked wife.

Nineteen-year-old Kate Hogarth falls in love with the young journalist Charles Dickens. At first, Charles is infatuated with his bride and Kate delights in her new life, the balm to her husband’s irrepressible spirit. But as Charles finds fame as a novelist and the family rises through the ranks of Victorian society, Kate becomes acutely aware of his frustration that real people cannot be manipulated as easily as his characters.

A chance encounter with Charles transports the orphan Anne Brown to the heart of the Dickens household—and a piercingly intimate view of the Dickens’s fracturing marriage. Years later, Kate, subdued by Charles’s powerful personality, seeks comfort in her trusted servant, Anne. But while Anne has come to care deeply for Mrs. Dickens, her loyalties are tested to breaking point as Charles takes control of their future.

Told from the points of view of Kate and Anne, Mrs. Dickens traces a long marriage in all its tenderness, grief, romance and fury.