Girl in a Blue Dress, Gaynor Arnold

Alfred Gibson's funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives, and she begins to examine her own life more closely.
She uncovers the deviousness and hypnotic power of her celebrity author husband. But now Dodo will need to face her grown-up children, and worse, her redoubtable younger sister, Sissy, and the charming actress, Miss Ricketts.
In Alfred Gibson the fierce energy and brilliance of the most famous of the Victorian Novelists is recreated, in a heart-warming story of first love - of a cocky young writer smitten by a pretty girl in a blue dress.