Novelist Emily Howes gives the often forgotten Kate Hogarth a voice for the first time. A complex woman, she was married to the celebrated author Charles Dickens for twenty-two years and had ten children with him. In the early days of their marriage, Charles is infatuated with Kate. Two decades further on, with fame and fortune, he falls dramatically in love with another woman and Kate is redundant. She is publicly humiliated and cruelly slandered by Dickens and when they separate in 1858 it is his version of events that define what little is remembered of her life. Emily Howes retells Kate’s story in an immersive novel that captures a woman’s silenced narrative and gives a new understanding of how things may have been for Mrs Dickens.
