The Invisible Woman

2013 - Dir.: Ralph Fiennes - 1 hours 51 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on April 25th, 2015
Ralph Fiennes may be the director and star of this handsomely mounted tale of the private life of Charles Dickens, but it's Felicity Jones who makes it fly. She plays Nelly Ternan, a young actress of indeterminate talent who captures the author's eye and heart, but wrestles (philosophically, morally, practically) with the idea of becoming his mistress. Abi Morgan's insightful script takes its lead from Claire Tomalin's book of the same name. At the heart of Nelly's dilemma is a gender inequality that Morgan's screenplay lays bare; the progressive "freedom" from marriage that Dickens and cohort Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) merrily espouse is a liberty for men only. 
The invisibility of the title appears to allude to Nelly, whose status in his life Dickens never really acknowledged, but Morgan and Fiennes show us that as the wronged wife, Catherine was also invisible, and so was Nelly's drawn and haunted mother, who considered it her duty to stand aside and let the great author have his high-minded, tortured way. 
The film is certainly based on fact. Dickens was forty-five when he met Ellen (Nelly) Ternan and she was eighteen, slightly older than his daughter Katey. Nelly Ternan was clever and charming, forceful of character, and interested in literature and the theatre. Dickens referred to her as his "magic circle of one". Matters came to a head in 1858 when Catherine Dickens opened a packet delivered by a London jeweller which contained a gold bracelet meant for Nelly with a note written by her husband. The Dickenses separated that May, after 22 years of marriage. Nelly left the stage in 1860, and was supported by Dickens from then on. She lived in houses he took under false names at Slough and later at Nunhead, and is thought to have had a son by him who died in infancy. Dickens left a legacy of £1,000 to Nelly in his will on his death in 1870, and sufficient income from a trust fund to ensure that she would never have to work again