Emily Howes

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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 I kind of started from that place of maybe this isn't the story that we think it is.

Yeah, so Anne is a real life character too.

She was the Dickens' servant.

She joined them as a nursery maid when she was 18 and Kate would only have been about 21 at that point.

They were on holiday in Broadstairs.

So she was called Anne of Broadstairs for quite a long time.

She got taken in by the family.

We don't know much about her origins and she stayed with them for the whole length of the marriage.

And I won't give away what happens in the end, but it seemed to me that she kind of took on a really interesting role because she was Kate's lady's maid, she was very much part of the domestic home.

And yet at the same time, of course, she was kind of bought and paid for by Dickens.

So something in this triangle between the three of them felt really interesting to me.

And also a great way to give a different spin on Kate.

Somebody seeing her from the outside and seeing Dickens from the outside as well.

Kate's very soft and I think Anne's got a slightly tougher energy and maybe slightly more sarcastic energy so she can see perhaps with a slightly more contemporary pair of eyes.

Yeah, it's a challenge.

And it's also kind of an ethical challenge as well, because what gives you the right in a way to write about somebody else's story?

And for me, that was a brilliant thing to get into in the book itself, because Dickens told us who she was.

I'm telling you who she was and speaks up and gives her side of who Kate was.

So it was a really beautiful way for me actually to be able to explore this whole idea of who tells our story and why and what are the ethics of that.

Your face is lethal.

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