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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Radio 2 Book Club · 'Mrs Dickens' by Emily Howes · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

And that made me really want to find out more about who she really was and to try and tell a story.

Well, I wanted to tell the whole story of the marriage from the very beginning to the very end.

So it begins as a romance and he was kind of an extraordinary person to fall in love with really, Charles.

Very magnetic, very charismatic, very, very funny, restless, full of energy.

And it began as a love story.

You can still, there's a book actually of all his letters to her.

She kept them all for the rest of her life.

And on her deathbed asked that they be given to the British Museum so that the world may know he loved me once.

So they're quite romantic, especially at the beginning.

And the book documents, my book documents the whole of the marriage from the very first moment she meets him in her father's hallway all the way through to him leaving her.

And casting her out of the house, she had to leave her 10 children behind.

She had to leave her home.

She was completely cast out and ostracised.

There's so much stuff about Dickens' life.

But everything around Kate and how Kate was talked about kind of falls in line with the way that Dickens was speaking about her at the end of the marriage.

There's a brilliant biography that's relatively recent by a professor in America called Lillian Nader.

And that was invaluable because she just really set about uncovering.

And we had coffee, actually, and we both sat down and were just bonding over how horribly this woman was treated, not just by Dickens, but kind of by all the biographers and people who just took up his version of the story.

And she does this really radical, wonderful job of looking at the facts of what might actually be there and giving us a completely different interpretation.

So having that resource was brilliant.

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