Secondly, Ternan had been an actor when she met Dickens. This secrecy lasted long after Dickens’ death: Ternan told no one about her relationship with the novelist except her mother and sisters. In consequence, his relationship with Ternan had to remain a secret. Although his affair caused the breakdown of his marriage, to divorce his wife would have entailed scandal. First, Dickens and what we might now call his PR team worked hard to present the novelist as an exemplary moral figure. Tomalin explains that Ternan was excised from the historical record for two reasons. 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. 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. Framing the story of Nelly’s life is the story of Tomalin’s investigation. The Invisible Woman won the NCR Book Award and was adapted into a film of the same title in 2013. 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. 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. 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.
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