The agonies of an abandoned wife: Mrs Dickens, by Emily Howes, reviewed
For every smog-spitting chimney in Victorian London there was a woman tasked with keeping the hearth clean, both physically and morally. This ‘angel in the house’, as Coventry Patmore dubbed her, lived entirely for her family, but above all for her husband. With her organs tightly compressed beneath a whalebone corset, she ministered to his every need and forgave him all his worldly sins. She was, in short, not a real woman but an ideal. In Mrs Dickens, Emily Howes exercises the novelist’s prerogative to flesh out an ideal, to show how the real woman beneath her halo of thorns suffered.
