Gaynor Arnold

What sparked Girl in a Blue Dress?
I've always been a fan of Dickens's novels and found his life equally fascinating. But the notion of writing about it only came when I thought of narrating it from the wife's point of view. She was the voiceless person in the Dickenses' marriage and I was struck by the pathos of her request that her letters should be preserved 'that the world may know that he loved me once.'  Although Dickens had tremendous public acclaim, in private he was a difficult man, and that was the aspect of the story – the dichotomy - that interested me. I set out to write a parallel fictional narrative in which my hero and heroine are Alfred and Dorothea Gibson, to whom slightly different things happen, but where the narrative coincides at the most important points with the known facts.

Please set the scene of the novel for us.

It's London 1870, and following the huge public funeral of her estranged husband, Dorothea Gibson, secluded for many years in a suite of upstairs rooms with only a servant and a lapdog for company, begins to take stock of her life, re-examining (or examining for the first time) her relationship with her husband, her children, her two sisters and with the woman she believes to have been her husband's mistress. She tells the story of her courtship and marriage in a series of flashbacks while at the same time embarking on a series of surprising new encounters (including one with Queen Victoria) in which she begins to explore the complexity of her husband's personality and the impact he has had on all around him.

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel?If so, which one(s) and why?
Alfred was the easiest character to write; he seemed to light up the page and it was always great fun to be in his company. But I was very fond of the servants - especially Wilson and Bessie, the unsung heroines of the story, who both look after Dorothea in their own way. I enjoyed describing how Wilson makes a fetish of buying cheap tea and stale buns and disapproves of 'hundreds of callers' who dare to make inroads on her domestic economies. And I loved Bessie, Dorothea's common-sense nursemaid and 'saviour' of her child-bearing years, who takes the children in hand - perambulating them for fierce outings and warming them afterwards in front of the fire. I enjoyed getting their voices right in my head. I particularly liked the scene where Bessie and Wilson meet for the first time. Servants were a group of people essential to Victorian Society, and ubiquitous in any Dickensian novel.

What are you reading at the moment?
I began Black Rock by Amanda Smyth when I was on the train last week. It's just out, it's set in Trinidad, and it's enthralling. But I'm also reading The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer as my bedtime book. Ian was on the same bill as me at the Lichfield Festival last year and is committed to making history come alive. I've also got Cranford  by Mrs Gaskell on the bathroom shelf, next to the loo. Surprisingly, I've never read it before. It's full of gentle but wickedly accurate observation.

What are you working on now?
I'm kicking around a few ideas for a new novel set in the Thirties, but I'm not convinced about it at the moment. It needs more time to gestate.