![\"English](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2012\/01\/hWEB-101210_Lillian_Nayder_7155_print.jpg\")
<\/a>Lillian Nayder, professor of English at Bates College.<\/p><\/div>\n
Bates College Professor of English Lillian Nayder, with the help of Bates music faculty colleague James P. Parakilas, is about to give Fanny that introduction, or reintroduction, through the voice Fanny was known for in her day: the music, both vocal and instrumental, that she composed and performed for admiring (and often paying) audiences.<\/p>\n
Nayder has a strong academic interest in the generally forgotten lives of the women in Dickens\u2019 life, and his sometimes difficult relationships with those women. She is author of The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth<\/em> (Cornell University Press, 2011), the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married, with whom he had 10 children, and from whom he separated in 1858 (after 22 years of marriage), claiming she was an unfit wife and mother and pursuing a relationship with 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan instead.<\/p>\n The book presents a very different picture of Catherine that has won wide media attention from outlets including The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, The London Review of Books<\/em> and the BBC. The book inspired a BBC2 television special entitled Mrs. Dickens\u2019 Family Christmas<\/em>, which aired in the UK at the end of December 2011.<\/p>\n Nayder has now turned her attention to Fanny, as she drafts an historical novel that examines the relations among Fanny, Letitia Austin (another of Charles\u2019 siblings) and their sisters-in-law Catherine and Harriet.<\/p>\n Fanny died of tuberculosis in 1848 at age 38, leaving a husband and two sons. But during that short life she gained some renown among lovers of both secular and sacred music. She sang and played in churches and concert halls in England, and also gave private lessons to students at the Royal Academy and elsewhere.<\/p>\n In fact, the way in which she is best known today is through an autobiographical fragment Charles Dickens wrote as an adult, recalling the pain that Fanny\u2019s teenage success at the Royal Academy caused him. With his parents in 1824, he watched as Fanny was awarded medals for her musical efforts and success\u2014 during the very time their parents \u201cthrew away\u201d his talents by consigning him to work at Warren\u2019s Blacking factory in London, where he pasted labels on jars of shoe blacking. Charles loved his sister but at this time in his boyhood he contrasted what he perceived as Fanny\u2019s privilege with his own deprivation and \u201cfelt as if [his] heart were rent.\u201d<\/p>\n