GIRL IN A BLUE DRESS: A Novel Inspired by the Life and Marriage of Charles Dickens. Gaynor Arnold. Crown. 414 pages. $25.99.

Love it or loathe it, our paparazzi/camera phone culture has made it all but impossible for modern-day celebrities to keep scandalous secrets. Not so the Victorians. Charles Dickens' 13-year relationship with young Nelly Ternan remained hidden from view not merely throughout his later life but for some seven decades after his death, only emerging in 1939 with the publication of a biography of his daughter Katey. More recently, Claire Tomalin's biography of Ternan, TheInvisible Woman, exposed as much as is likely to be known about the diminutive actress for whom the writer rejected his wife of 22 years and with whom he may or may not have had a physical relationship and a child.

Gaynor Arnold chooses to tackle head-on the dichotomy between adored public persona and not-so-endearing private man in her bold first novel. In the guise of Alfred Gibson -- aka The One and Only, the Great Original -- she introduces a mercurial, charismatic writer of astonishing skill and output whose ability to charm is matched only by his ruthless self-interest.

As the story opens, Gibson is dead, his funeral a scene of mass grief and national desolation comparable to Princess Diana's. Soon, though, we flash back to the artist as a young man, resplendent in peacock (but ''not quite gentlemanly'') finery -- scarlet waistcoat, sky blue coat, yellow trousers -- with long hair, thrilling eyes, irresistible energy and few funds. Young Dorothea Millar falls instantly under his spell, marries him despite her parents' discouragement and stands by him as he writes his way into the enduring affections of the public.

Blonde and pretty in her form-flattering blue dress, Dorothea nonetheless seems an odd choice for the tireless legal clerk with literary ambitions. She is unworldly and knows nothing about housekeeping while Gibson, scarred by early poverty, is obsessive about balancing his domestic budget and terrified, even when at his most successful, of losing financial security. Slowly the reader comes to understand that Dorothea is merely the latest in a line of semi-infantile angels at the hearth.

Once pregnant and rounded into the form of a woman, she starts to suffer the slow process of marginalization, as her husband's affection and attention turn to a sequence of smaller, slimmer women, beginning with her younger sister. Having given birth to eight children, Dorothea is finally ejected from the family home, to live alone for Gibson's 10 remaining years, while he finds comfort with his latest teenage vision in blue, bird-like Wilhelmina Ricketts.

Arnold's achievement, in constructing a busy, engaging, above-all empathetic fiction on the foundation of facts, is considerable. Gibson emerges as a monster of a kind, narcissistic and voracious, yet his gaiety, inventiveness and magnetism shine off the page. (Arnold also invents a Dickensian oeuvre for him -- Miggs' Tales, Edward Cleverly, Little Amy -- and quotes plausibly from it.)

The novel is principally Dorothea's story, but her failings remain entirely evident. Gibson is keen to suggest that the marriage breakdown is due to her delusions and jealousy, but, in, fact Dorothea is simply a victim of her age, a social ornament ill-equipped for the challenges of partnership and parenthood.

Indeed, Arnold's women offer a useful reminder of middle-class women's lot in Victorian London. They were legally dependent on their menfolk, often struggling to retain respectability in the teeth of poverty, above all in the case of Dorothea, wholly reliant on a husband's goodwill.

That melding of a 21st century sensibility with a 19th century scenario may lead to weakness, such as the novel's overly modern conclusion, but is also a source of strength. Arnold, seemingly fearless in her evocation of an unsurpassed literary genius, peels away the reputation of the Great Original to reveal a man whose flaws, when they involved women, were sadly all-too commonplace.

Elsbeth Lindner is a writer in London.

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