The Invisible Woman

British literary biographer Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens is a 1990 biography of the great Victorian writer’s long-term mistress. Because Dickens and his executors destroyed many of his private papers, few records survive relating to his thirteen-year affair with Nelly Ternan, an actor many years younger than the married novelist. Through a combination of historical detective work and imaginative speculation, Claire Tomalin attempts to reconstruct Nelly’s biography and her role in Dickens’s life during a period when he was at the height of his fame. The Invisible Woman won the NCR Book Award and was adapted into a film of the same title in 2013.

Framing the story of Nelly’s life is the story of Tomalin’s investigation. The author notes that although Nelly Ternan “played a central part in the life of Charles Dickens at a time when he was perhaps the best-known man in Britain,” and was the first person mentioned in the novelist’s will, almost nothing is known about her. She outlived Dickens by many years, but she never wrote anything about her life with him, and left “precious little spoken record” that “she had ever known him.” Dickens’s first biographer (and friend) John Forster made no mention of her, and any letters between the lovers seem to have been destroyed.

Tomalin explains that Ternan was excised from the historical record for two reasons. First, Dickens and what we might now call his PR team worked hard to present the novelist as an exemplary moral figure. Although his affair caused the breakdown of his marriage, to divorce his wife would have entailed scandal. In consequence, his relationship with Ternan had to remain a secret. This secrecy lasted long after Dickens’ death: Ternan told no one about her relationship with the novelist except her mother and sisters. Secondly, Ternan had been an actor when she met Dickens. The theatre was considered a scandalous, unladylike profession, and soon after her relationship with Dickens began, Ternan left the stage and attempted to cover up her past.



As a result, Tomalin is forced to piece together many small clues to reconstruct Ternan’s relationship with Dickens. She finds scraps of evidence in diaries and letters, playbills and photographs, to create a picture of “someone who—almost—wasn’t there; who vanished into thin air.”

Ternan came from an impoverished theatrical clan: her sisters, mother, and grandmother were all actors. They worked as a family, touring the country in low-budget plays. Ternan first met Dickens when his theatrical company hired her family. Tomalin points out that Dickens’ attraction to Ternan may well have had something to do with his love of theatre. A performer who was famed for his readings from his own work, Dickens had long wanted to act.

Dickens also felt deep sympathy for the poor—a major feature of his writing—and the financial struggles of Ternan’s family may have helped to endear her to him. Certainly, as their relationship blossomed, Dickens seems to have begun to support her family, buying the Ternans a house in London and paying for one of Nelly’s sisters to study music. Dickens’ money took Ternan’s family “from poverty and uncertainty to something approaching luxury.”



From the sparse, available sources, Tomalin paints a picture of the young Nelly as innocent and girlish. She was only eighteen when she met the famous novelist, and Tomalin imagines that she must have been overwhelmed by his attention. Having lost her father at an early age, Ternan may also have found in the older man a wise and benevolent father figure. Of course, Dickens’ wealth and influence may well have been another factor. Tomalin concludes that it is impossible to say how far—if at all—Ternan loved Dickens.

In order to protect Dickens’ (valuable) reputation, their relationship was conducted in secret. Dickens bought Ternan a house a little way outside London, where he visited her two or three times a week from his own home in the capital. When he was with her in public, he used the pseudonym “Charles Tringham.” Tomalin wonders whether this skullduggery inspired the double life that forms the center of his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Neither party seems to have been happy with the covert nature of the relationship. Tomalin suggests that Ternan must have felt the full stigma of being “the Fallen Woman, held in particular public contempt by the Victorians.” Her life must have been dull: as domestic as a wife and as dependent as a daughter, she was stuck in a dreary corner of the country, unable to discuss the most important person in her life with anyone, even close friends.



Meanwhile, Dickens felt anxious about preserving his double life and guilty about the pain it was causing Ternan: “The more he loved her…the more painful must have been the knowledge that his love might be responsible for making her submit to difficulty and disgrace.” Tomalin shows that Dickens increasingly tried to justify his actions by claiming that his marriage had always been unhappy. She argues that his inescapable emotional bind was the engine of his masterpiece, the melancholy Great Expectations.

When Dickens died in 1870, Ternan’s life was transformed. She married a man twelve years her junior and had two children. None of them learned about her affair with the Victorian era’s most famous personality until after Ternan’s death.