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Gaynor Arnold was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales. An only child, she grew up in a rented house with her parents (both shop assistants), grandparents and aunt. When she was 10 she asked her parents for a typewriter and proceeded to 'churn out three plays a week.' She turned to reading fiction following the death of her father when she was 11; it was then that she read David Copperfield for the first of many times.
Although both her parents left school at 14 years old, she stayed on, eventually winning a place to read English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, where she acted in many plays, notably at the Edinburgh Festival and in a tour of the U.S. She describes her time at Oxford as "bliss" - it "was such a hedonistic experience that, when I left, I thought I really must do something with my life."
After two years of social work training she married her husband, Nicolas (who she met at Oxford, where he was studying history at Magdalen College). They moved to Exeter in the south of England, where she frequently visited some of the most deprived and dysfunctional households.
Over time she says the job became increasingly grueling. Speaking to the British Daily Telegraph she says, "I took some time out after having my second child, and when I came back to working with children in care, it got harder and harder. The types of problems became more severe, and the whole lid came off the sexual-abuse issue, which we naively thought hardly ever happened when I started out. All the child protection processes became more entrenched, and it became harder and harder to do the job."
Since 1996 Arnold, has worked for the Birmingham City Council as part of a recruitment team for adoption and fostering. She and Nicholas, a retired university lecturer, live in a large Victorian terraced house on the outskirts of the city. They have two adult children.
For almost 40 years, "jobs, children and life" got in the way of her writing. Then she joined a writers' group in the Nineties and rediscovered her love of writing.
Her first novel, Girl in a Blue Dress, was published in the UK in early 2009. The book was listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker prize. She also wrote Lying Together (2011), After Such Kindness (2012), and co-authored The Sea in Birmingham (2013).
Gaynor Arnold's website
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What inspired you to write Girl in a Blue Dress?
It's a long story, starting in my childhood when I
first became fascinated by the novels of Charles Dickens. Later, I graduated to
reading about his life and became equally fascinated by his rags-to-riches
story, his thwarted loves, his doomed marriage, and his secret mistress. The
more I read, the more intriguing it seemed that a man so full of compassion for
his fellow men—and who was such a supporter of family life and the sanctity of
the home—came to act so harshly towards his wife. I was fascinated by the
contradictory psychology of the man, and the psychology of the whole marriage (a
supremely Victorian marriage), but it did not occur to me for many years that
there was a novel in it. After all, the facts were a matter of public record,
painstakingly researched by professional biographers; what could I add? I was in
the meantime busily writing about contemporary men and women. However, the
"Charles Dickens story" niggled away at me and gradually the notion evolved that
maybe I could write something from the point of view of the scorned wife, a
woman about whose thoughts and feelings relatively little is known. This notion
...
Tracy Chevalier was born in Washington, DC but has lived in England all her adult life. She now has dual citizenship. She has a BA in English from Oberlin College, Ohio and an MA in creative writing from the University of ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Girl in a Blue Dress
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Daisy Goodwin is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Fortune Hunter The American Heiress. She is a Harkness scholar who attended Columbia University's film school after earning a degree in history at... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Girl in a Blue Dress
Try:
The American Heiress
by Daisy Goodwin
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