This is the second year running that the little Tindal Street Press, operating out of Birmingham's Custard Factory, has had a novel on the Man Booker longlist. Gaynor Arnold's first book fills a biographical vacuum by telling the story of Charles Dickens's unhappy wife Catherine from her own point of view.

The characters have different names - Dickens is Alfred Gibson and his wife Catherine is Dorothea or Dodo - and so do the titles of his books, but Arnold makes no secret of the real identity of the Great Man whose monstrous treatment of his wife has been well documented in many biographies, but was never endorsed by her, except passively. The outline of Mrs Dickens's tragedy can be traced clearly enough in two photographs of her, the first taken just before her marriage in 1836 when she was a slim girl of 19, the second in 1857, just before Dickens made her sign an agreement to separate and dumped her in another house, as a fat middle-aged matron.

Arnold's Dodo Gibson is this fat matron, whose first-person narrative begins with her estranged husband's funeral in Westminster Abbey. She was not there herself, but hears about it from her lively and angry eldest daughter, Kitty, the only one of her nine children who still visits her.

Dodo's narrative weaves back and forth between present and past, especially that brief golden time of courtship and marriage, when the dandyish young legal clerk who was just starting to be a writer entrances her with his racing wit, iron will and passionate declarations of love. The reader, too, is carried away by Alfred's energy and self-confidence and cannot help sharing the pain of his rejection, while at the same time understanding how step by step she gives way to his whims and subterfuges.

How can she not permit him, when she herself is burdened with constant pregnancies and more and more children, to call in her younger sister? And when Alice dies suddenly, causing even more grief to him than her, to bring in the next sister, Sissy, who soon takes over running the household? Or finally to put her out of the house altogether while he pursues his secret liaison with the bewitching young actress Wilhelmina Ricketts (Dickens's Nelly Ternan)? It is a long, slow martyrdom to the hypnotic tyranny of the “One and Only”, whose taste is for young girls, who requires absolute loyalty without criticism and who continues to conceive children long after he is tired of them and of the woman who bears them.

Arnold contrives to keep this essentially passive, housebound woman's story constantly engrossing and in the end, after her husband's death, redemptive. She makes up with Sissy, she sees her children again, she even visits and comes to terms with Miss Ricketts. Arnold perhaps takes too many liberties with the known facts to please biographers, but she demonstrates fiction's capacity to imagine the truth behind the facts and so performs a service for the ghost of Catherine Dickens which no biographer, in the absence of further documentary evidence, could.

However odious the real Dickens may have been, in this perspective one inclines, with Dodo, to forgive Gibson “because he was Alfred, and I couldn't help loving him in spite of what he did to me”.

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
Tindal Street Press £9.99 pp441

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