SOURCE: Lee, Hermione. “The Man Who Didn't Sleep.” New Republic 204, no. 23 (10 June 1991): 35-8.

In the following excerpt, Lee offers a positive review of The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which she compares to Peter Ackroyd's simultaneously published biography of Dickens.

When Peter Ackroyd's 1,200-page biography of Dickens appeared in England, a friend of mine, a biographer herself, wanted to read it on a plane journey to Ireland. It was obviously unmanageable as hand-luggage, so she put it on her kitchen table, got out her bread knife, and sawed it in half. “It made two perfectly serviceable biographies,” she observed. The bread knife school of criticism seems a particularly appropriate one to apply to a biography about a divided soul. Ackroyd's Dickens is a double agent so full of secrets, paradoxes, and contradictions that only the most puzzling and provisional conclusions can be reached...