The Invisible Woman

In the opening shot of Ralph Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman, a vast cold seascape is punctuated by the small silhouette of a woman in black bustle striding left along the bottom of the image. We learn the woman is Nelly Wharton Robinson (Felicity Jones), who as 18-year-old Nelly Ternan became the secret mistress of Charles Dickens (Fiennes). That opening shot establishes her as a frail but resolute figure against a cold, massive and impersonal space. In a later flashback we will see her wowed by Dickens’ public reading of a sea storm scene. At film’s end, as she watches her young son she wrote into a school production of a Dickens play, the roar of the sea storm suggests that despite her claims she has still not freed herself from the storms and shadows of her secret lover.  

There’s the film. Dickens’ Victorian world was a male-centered order. As a huge and beloved celebrity he had the money and power to do anything — and anyone — he wanted. His family had to read in his letter in The Times that he had separated from them — and his lie that there was no truth in the rumours about his affair with Nelly. 

Both Dickens and the mature Nelly have spouses that don’t understand them. Dickens humiliates his wife by sending her to deliver his birthday gift to his mistress. Nelly keeps her husband in ignorance, claiming she only knew Dickens when she was nine. The man can afford to humiliate his wife; the woman has to nurse her husband’s illusion in order to survive. Indeed, Nelly is ushered into the affair by her own mother’s acknowledgment that Nelly has no future as an actress and has no better prospect than becoming the great man’s mistress. The film presents a less capable woman than the historic one. Nelly sinks into her role even after she is appalled by the common law relationship of Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins.

The film repeats Dickens’ quote that everyone has a secret, remains a mystery to everyone else. Nelly wistfully hopes two lovers can grow so close as to understand each other’s mystery. Not in any of the families here, except perhaps for Collins' non-marriage. Dickens seduces her through an ostensible exchange of secrets. Her’s is that her middle name is Lawless; his “secret” is his love for her. She is named Lawless but he has the power to be lawless. In a railcar crash he denies traveling with her and is more concerned with rescuing a page of his manuscript than caring for her.

The film remarkably captures the Victorian life, in the parlor, on the stage, in the sordid streets. But for all its period flavour, from the lights of celebrity to the shadows of the secret life, it’s less about Dickens’ hidden lover than about the continuing social order that even today privileges the male and suppresses the female. Dickens and his invisible woman serve as a reflection of the current social hierarchy.