Feet of clay

Reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Ellen Ternan - the young actress for whom Dickens abandoned his wife - I discover the extent to which my literary hero had feet of clay.

Dickens' passionate social documentation, live-loving humour, celebration of human nature in all it's diversity, fierce commentary on justice, poor reform, institutions and the Establishment- all this remains unchanged but I am seeing his heroines with a new eye.

Revelations of Dickens' Byzantine deceit, sexual double standards and double-dealings, hypocrisy and of utterly indefensible cruelty to his poor wife. His relationship with Ternan casts his insipid, passive, blandly pretty child-wives and doll-like victims in a whole new (disturbing) light for me.

Following it up with a viewing of the 2007 ITV take on The Old Curiosity Shop - the heroine of which, Little Nell, is the ultimate in pliable pedestal women - you can see Dickens has trouble representing flawed, real womenkind on the page. From Dora to Estella, is that it?

Interestly, it isn't (of course) the novels that have altered but my reading - thanks, Barthes! Is it dangerous to read too much secondary material? Does it muddy the instinctive reading or lift the scales from your eyes?

I am currently embarking on the Brenda Maddox biography of George Eliot. Fingers crossed there is nothing here to change the way I see Middlemarch - I am quite happy with my present understanding! So far, so good: lots of burgeoning Radicalism and working as the first female editor in London, editing a high profile quarterly ...