The adults speak from the time when Daisy was eleven years old, whereas Daisy, now known as Margaret, is looking back on that period from eight years later, when, just married, she has found and re-read the journal she kept during that fateful summer. However, Daisy Baxter, the fictionalised Alice Liddell, has little in common with her model other than being the daughter of an Oxford clergyman and this should be an early indication that while Arnold wants her reader to draw the obvious parallels she also has a deeper purpose: one which is instigated by common perceptions of Dodgson’s preference for the company of young girls, but which eventually throws an almost kindly light on what is often represented as a nascent pedophilia.įor the most part the novel is related by four first person narrators, Jameson, Daisy and both her parents. Like the earlier book this novel is loosely based on the relationship between a Victorian writer and a young woman in this case a very much younger woman because the writer fictionalised as John Jameson is clearly Charles Dodgson, better known to most as Lewis Carroll. I read The Girl in the Blue Dress when it first came out and so, knowing a little of the way Arnold worked in that novel, I decided that I would read her more recent book, After Such Kindness, in order to be able to make comparisons between the two. One of the books scheduled as a group read next month is Gaynor Arnold’s fictionalised depiction of the life led by Catherine Dickens after her husband fell in love with the young actress Nellie Ternan.

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold