At the height of his career, Charles Dickens's every move, appearance, and public utterance was pored over in the pubs and the press. But his private life concealed a profound secret: his thirteen-year affair with Ellen Ternan, a childlike actress who came from a family of traveling players. Barely eighteen when she met him, Ellen was everything Dickens's wife Catherine was not: boyishly slim, discreet, self-possessed, and, despite a sometimes bawdy career on the London stage, quietly demure. In this debut novel, Jeff Rackham tells this fascinating story in the alternating voices of Dickens's sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth; his friend, mystery writer and opium-addled rake Wilkie Collins; and Ellen Ternan herself. Through their words is revealed an engrossing tale of love and morality-and the titillating friction between public and private life.