The Invisible Woman

If a renowned writer were to embark in an affair with a younger woman, it would make some headlines, generate some chatter but most of us will leave it at that.

That was not the case in the 1850's. When esteemed author Charles Dickens begun an affair, all sorts of efforts were put in place to stop it from becoming public. Divorce in that time, was an absolute scandal, an abomination.

So, this young, attractive, talented woman who in all certainty had a profound effect in the works of one of the most respected writers in the English language was in effect an invisible woman. Whilst she was the centre of Dickens' world, the world ought to not know her. Such were those times.

Whilst it might appear as sluggish, even flat that is not so. We get to observe the effect of the affair amongst people who had a compulsion to appear composed and reserved at all times. It is a glimpse in to a world gone by.

A 6 or a 7? I went with 6, but would have preferred 6.5.

The film is beautifully made, which is no surprise, with beautiful costumes and scenery from the Victorian era, as well as being beautifully acted and well produced. However, although loosely based on the biographical book of the same name (The Invisible Woman), the plot line is vague and esoteric; that is, "intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest."

We see glimpses into the life and behaviors of Dickens, his mistress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, and Dickens' wife, but the film provides little depth or detail, and certainly no explanation for the meaning of these glimpses, or even a clear time line. If you know enough about Dickens ahead of time it will make sense; if not, it will remain a mystery (such as, "what was that scene about?") unless you, as I did this morning, start learning more about Dickens' life as he lived it, including better understanding the book the film was based upon. We see otherwise unexplained glimpses into the life of Dickens and Nelly, some of which seem to be inaccurate dramatizations (poetic license?), which have little meaning on their own, and leave you wondering what just happened, and why was that important. You'll get the overall picture, but it will be like a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces, some of which , because of those missing pieces, are actually incorrectly put together. If you're not already familiar with the life of Dickens and Ternan, read up on Dickens before you go, or be prepared to read up on him after you see the movie. But don't otherwise expect to come up with a clear picture of anything, except that Dickens and Ternan had a long-standing affair that affected her past his death.

There was a film called "The Invisible Woman", a sequel to "The Invisible Man", from 1940, but there is no connection between that film and the 2013 version. This film is not science fiction but the story of the love affair between Charles Dickens and his mistress Nelly Ternan. Nelly is "invisible" in the sense that Dickens, worried about the possible effect on sales of his books, is forced to keep her existence a secret, even though it is common knowledge that he and his wife Catherine have separated. Intercut with the main action are scenes showing Nelly's later life in the 1880s, more than a decade after Dickens's death, as the wife of a man named George Wharton Robinson.

I had previously always thought of Nelly as a gold-digging bimbo, a talentless actress who used her good looks to snare a famous, wealthy older man and lure him away from his wife. That is not, however, how she is portrayed in this film. It is, in fact, Dickens who comes off badly. As played by Ralph Fiennes (who also directed) he comes across as a jovial, fun-loving party animal, revelling in his fame and celebrity, but also deeply selfish, not only in the way he treats Catherine but also in the way he treats Nelly. Nelly herself, by contrast is portrayed as a rather serious young woman, who in many ways shares conventional Victorian attitudes towards sex. She is, for example, shocked to discover that Wilkie Collins, Dickens's friend and fellow novelist, lives quite openly with a woman to whom he is not married. She is in love with Dickens, but is distressed by her ambiguous status and by the fact that their relationship cannot be acknowledged. She is shown giving birth to a stillborn son in France, a detail which clearly betrays the film's origins in Claire Tomalin's controversial biography. I should perhaps point out that not all Dickens scholars are convinced by Ms Tomalin's thesis that Nelly bore his child. (Indeed, some even insist that their relationship was platonic). The fact that the issue is still so shrouded in mystery and controversy, however, does indicate just what lengths he went to in order to protect his privacy.

The Nelly of this film is therefore a complex character, far more than a mere Victorian bimbo, and it is a tribute to the talents of the lovely Felicity Jones, an actress I was not previously familiar with, that she emerges as someone both likable and entirely credible. Fiennes is also good as Dickens, a man uneasily aware that in leaving his wife for another woman he is betraying the family values he once so assiduously championed. (He even called the magazine he edited "Household Words"). Other good contributions come from Kristin Scott Thomas as Nelly's mother and Joanna Scanlan as Mrs Dickens. Although Catherine was the "innocent party" in the breakdown of her marriage, it is all too clear from Scanlan's interpretation just why Dickens felt unable to live with this dull, frumpy woman.

Fiennes the actor is fine, but I was less taken with Fiennes the director. The pace of the film can be excessively slow and the switches between the chronologically earlier scenes, taking place in the late 1850s or 1860s, and the later ones, taking place in the 1880s, were too abrupt and made the story difficult at times to follow. It didn't help that Felicity Jones (aged about 30) looks much the same age in the later scenes (when Nelly would have been in her forties) as she does in the early ones (when she would have been in her teens or twenties). Felicity does have a different hairstyle in the later scenes, but the purpose of this seems to have been to mark the changes in fashion between the 1860s and the 1880s, not to make her look older.

Another thing that surprised me was that the film did not deal directly with Dickens's death or with the immediate impact this had on Nelly's life. It struck me that this was one time when Nelly's status as the "invisible woman" worked in her favour; had she been openly acknowledged as Dickens's mistress she would, given the often hypocritical attitudes of the Victorians towards extra-marital sex, have found it very difficult to make a respectable marriage after the sudden, unexpected death of her protector while he was still in his fifties. (She might have found this difficult even if Dickens had obtained a divorce and made her his second wife). Possibly, however, the scriptwriters avoided any speculation of this nature because it would not have fitted in well with their view of Nelly as the innocent victim of her lover's selfishness.

The film is made in the best British "heritage cinema" style and will doubtless find favour with many fans of that style of film-making. I was, however, in some ways disappointed with it, feeling that its structure could have been clearer and that it could have dealt with this aspect of Charles Dickens's life in greater depth. 7/10

So much so that her husband forgets to name her when introducing his family. Charles Dickens was always fascinated by very young, slender, virginal girls, they are venerated in all his novel. His wife had been such a girl when he married her, but after giving him ten children in a period without anesthetic, she has naturally gained weight and aged. He may tell himself the classic, "my wife doesn't understand me," but it's clear he really just wants a new young, slender girl. The film itself doesn't seem to buy the story that his wife is intellectually boring but instead clearly shows Dickens flinching in disgust when he looks at his wife.

Neither are we shown any brilliance of mind in Nelly as the actress maintains a slack jawed, rabbit-like expression through most of her scenes.

Most biographies depict Dickens as not only treating his wife as invisible, but openly ridiculing her and inventing ways to be cruel to her. We see an example of that here when he makes her take his gift of jewelry to his mistress.

Why we should find this affair romantic I don't know. It's boring and trite and, worst of all, taints any future reading of his novels. A film about the life of Catherine Dickens sounds much more interesting.

Claire Tomalin in the first chapter of 'The Invisible Woman' states that Fanny and Ellen Ternan were 'written out of any biographies of both Dickens and Trollope for two reasons'. Thus begins the first of many such statements that appear in her book that can't be substantiated. They are not facts, though they are presented as such. Any film based on the book by Claire Tomalin can only suffer, as a result, from the contrived nature and bias of the book.

Yes, this film might have deserved 8 out of 10 stars if Charles Dickens hadn't come into it and it was simply the story of a writer who had an affair with a much younger woman in Victorian times. Unfortunately, Charles Dickens does come into it, and he has come into it in every review and discussion about this film that I've come across so far.

The first half of Ralph Fiennes' film is beautifully nuanced and utterly delightful in its depiction of Dickens and his relationship with the Ternan family through their mutual love of the theatre. The developing relationship between Dickens and Ellen Ternan is persuasive in cinematic terms - until the downward slide into the mire of 'revelations' spawned by Claire Tomalin's book.

Stripped of meaningful content, cinematography and acting too become meaningless. When a film is based on the life of a great writer like Charles Dickens, those who have read widely about his life and work will feel uneasy when he is taken out of context to fulfil a role aggressively forced on him by a less than scrupulous biographer or film maker. The so-called 'revelations' translated to film may spoil one's enjoyment of the narrative as surely as a poor reproduction of a film to a DVD will lessen its visual impact.

Those who have a scant knowledge of Dickens and his work will more easily be able to accept this depiction of the writer and the man. Sadly, like many of the reviewers and others connected with the film, they may then become 'authorities' on Charles Dickens and his relationship with Ellen Ternan and busily go about perpetuating myths and gross distortions of facts.

By the time furtive sex is followed by the birth of a still-born child and Dickens and Ellen appear unchaperoned in the Staplehurst train crash, the sound of Nelly's pacing on the beach at Margate becomes deafening - but also more laboured. We enter a world of fiction that is not nearly so satisfying. The more the film strays from known sources and tries to convince, the more it flounders and disappoints.

One can only hope someone makes another film about Charles Dickens that does justice to everyone in a way that saves them from the strange mix of sexual fantasy and strident feminism they appear to have generated. While Nelly suffers from not having the reasons for the secrecy surrounding her relationship fully explored, Catherine Dickens and George Wharton Robinson suffer in a way that endows them with as much character as a couple of wooden pieces in a jig-saw puzzle.

'It would be a far, far better thing' to stay home and read Dickens' letters or other biographies or more of Dickens' own writing or Edward Wagenknecht's 'Dickens and the Scandalmongers' or more about the social and sexual mores of the time than to believe this film could possibly shed any light on the less stereotypical but more complex relationship between Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan.