This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie Dowell is invisible in the sense that Claire Tomalin described Nelly Ternan in The Invisible Woman. While Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens, simply ‘vanished into thin air’, Nellie Dowell, who may or may not have been the mistress of Muriel, trod so lightly on the ground that she left barely a footprint behind her.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £22.95 Tel: 08430 600033. Frances Wilson’s books include The Courtesan’s Revenge and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth.
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