Mrs Dickens

Emily Howes is a writer and existential psychotherapist. Her first novel, The Painter’s Daughters, won the Mslexia Novel Prize judged by Dame Hilary Mantel, and was one of The Times’ ten best historical novels of 2024.

Mrs Dickens, Emily’s second novel, tells the story of Catherine Dickens, who bore her husband ten children over the course of a twenty-two-year marriage, climbed Vesuvius, wrote a cookbook, yet still couldn’t live up to the Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House.

‘Mrs Dickens has my whole heart. Will undoubtedly be one of my books of the year…I was enthralled’
Jennie Godfrey

‘A beautiful, heartbreaking, immersive novel, which brings a woman’s silenced story back to vivid, irrepressible life. A story about the cost of male ambition, and the courage it takes for a woman to reclaim her own narrative. Howes’ distinctive voice is so warm, so relatable, so companionable; readers will fall in love with Kate, or “Mrs. Dickens’
Roisín O’Donnell

‘Powerful, tender and evocative, Mrs Dickens is a deeply thoughtful contribution to our understanding of the life of Catherine Dickens’
Harriet Constable

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