Nelly Ternan

Nelly Ternan was Charles Dickens's companion for the last thirteen years of his life, and the relationship was concealed so thoroughly that it was almost entirely lost until the twentieth century. She was an actress from a theatrical family, appearing on stage from the age of three, and she was eighteen when Dickens - forty-five, the most famous writer in the English-speaking world, and the father of ten - saw her in a play at Manchester in 1857. Within months he had separated from his wife Catherine after twenty-two years, published a statement about it in his own magazine, and quarrelled permanently with anyone who suggested a reason. Ternan left the stage in her early twenties and lived on money he provided, in houses he rented, under names that were not always hers, in England and for periods in France. Almost nothing survives directly: he burned his correspondence in 1860 in a bonfire in his garden, his children destroyed more, and his official biographer John Forster left her out entirely. The Staplehurst rail crash of 1865, in which Dickens was travelling with her and her mother, is the one moment the concealment slipped, and he avoided giving evidence at the inquest to keep it from slipping further. After his death in 1870 she married a clergyman twelve years younger, took years off her age, and raised two children who did not know. Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman reconstructed her in 1990 from what was left. Her sister Fanny married Thomas Trollope, the novelist s brother. A bank book showing payments to her survived and is part of the evidence. Ralph Fiennes filmed Tomalin s book in 2013. She is buried at Southsea under her married name.

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