The World of Charles Dickens: Biographical Resources

From Amazon.com: 'Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens’s marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record.

In this remarkable work of biography and scholarly reconstruction, the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys and Jane Austen rescues Nelly from the shadows of history, not only returning the neglected actress to her rightful place, but also providing a compelling portrait of the great Victorian novelist himself. The result is a thrilling literary detective story and a deeply compassionate work that encompasses all those women who were exiled from the warm, well-lighted parlors of Victorian England.'

From the book jacket: 'Smiley evokes Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporaries: convivial, astute, boundlessly energetic--and lionized...Dickens not only led the action-packed life of a prolific writer, editor, and family man, but, balancing the artistic and the commercial in his work, he also consciously sustained his status as one of the first modern "celebrities".'

An intimate and engaging portrait of the great author and the women he loved: Ellen Ternan, Maria Beadnell, and Mary Scott Hogarth.

From Amazon.com: 'From his sensational public appearances to the obsessive love affair that led him to betray, deceive, and break with those closest to him, Charles Dickens: A Life is a triumph of the biographer’s craft, a comedy that turns to tragedy in a story worthy of Dickens’ own pen.'