Felicity Jones to Play Dickens’ Mistress
Ralph Fiennes’ debut as a director, for the adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is currently in a one week Oscar-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, (the full run begins on Jan. 20).
It was just announced that Felicity Jones will play Charles Dickens’ alleged mistress in Fiennes’ second directorial effort, The Invisible Woman, based on Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, (RH/Knopf, 1991). Shooting is planned for sometime in 2012, which happens to be the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth.
Tomalin’s new book, a full-length biography of Dickens, incorporates material from the earlier one. Other scholars, such as Peter Ackroyd have concluded that Dickens’ relationship with Ternan, whom he met when she was 18 and he was in his mid-forties, was strictly a friendship. Tomalin argues that not only was she his mistress, but they had a child together.
Tomalin talks about Dickens (but not about Ternan) in the following video:
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