Emily Howes
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Jun
Emily Howes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I'd started it even before that, I think.
Yeah, when I even got the very first book, I already had this idea for the book that I wanted to write.
And I went to the publisher with it, desperate to write it.
So I think we announced both of them at the same time, must be three or four years ago now.
Well, Kate is the wife of Charles, of course, the famous writer.
She's really not particularly well known in her own right.
And I think that's how Dickens wanted it.
One of the things I discovered as I was researching the book is that he just, I mean, he essentially launched a smear campaign against her.
It was quite a brutal smear campaign and really effective because even up until probably the last 10 or 20 years, it was still the received version of Kate's life that she was kind
Fat and boring and dull and not very clever.
Yes, they were married for 22 years and they had 10 children together.
And after 22 years, he left her for the actress Ellen Ternan, which is a bit more well known.
There was a film called The Invisible Woman, which had Felicity Jones and Ralph Fiennes in it.
And I was partly watching that that made me want to write about Kate because their love story is front and centre and it's quite a Hollywood look, I suppose.
It's kind of centred on their love story.
And in it, Kate is very much cast in the way that Dickens wrote about her towards the end of their marriage.
He said that his marriage was a blank, that it was a page with no words upon it or something like that.
He just tried to eradicate her completely from his life.
from his life.
And I think the film really did something similar to that in that it centres on Charles and Ellen and we get this kind of very quick glimpse of Kate getting changed by candlelight and she sort of looks quite boring and fat and a bit depressing and it's a sort of shorthand for, well, no wonder he left her for someone more glamorous.
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