The Charles Dickens Museum recently opened a new exhibition titled “Extra/Ordinary Women,” to “celebrate the real women who influenced Dickens and reveal the clues which help match several of them to their fictional counterparts.” Oliver Bray at The Conversation has a thoughtful review, which includes this passage:
“The exhibition also includes a letter from [opera singer Pauline] Viardot to Dickens’s biographer, where she recalls Dickens ”raining tears’ during her performance of Orphée. And it reveals something about Dickens that the exhibition continually circles back to: he existed in a self-made world of performance, admiration, emotional excess and artistic intoxication. He was drawn to women who were brilliant, expressive and creative, because they belonged to that same world of heightened feeling and dramatic possibility.”
The exhibition runs through September 6.
In other Dickens Museum news, debut novelist Annie Elliot, whose book Mr. & Mrs. Charles Dickens was published in the U.K. March 1, will give a free hybrid talk at the Museum on March 18. Go here to learn more and to get in-person tickets if you’re in the area, and online tickets if you’re not!
(Image courtesy of the Charles Dickens Museum.)
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