18th March 2026, 2pm

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Former MA in Creative Writing Anne Tipper (Now writing as Annie Elliot) is talking about her debut novel, Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens, at the Charles Dickens Museum in London on Wednesday 18^th March 2pm. This event is both in person and online/on demand.

After twenty-two years of marriage, Charles Dickens banished his wife, Kate from their home and nine children and wrecked her reputation to protect his own when he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old actress.

Mr & Mrs Charles Dickens is Kate’s story: a poignant self-portrait of a woman struggling to make sense of a love that defined, but nearly destroyed her. Re-reading her husband’s love letters after his sudden death, she celebrates the happy times they shared but also speaks up for herself to expose the darker side of the man the world reveres.

On her deathbed Kate asked her younger daughter to give Charles’s letters to the British Museum ‘so the world may know he loved me once.’ This novel reimagines a memoir to fulfil her dying wish and restore her to history as more than a famous author’s discarded wife. It bestows on Kate the respect, dignity, agency and voice she was denied in life.

Annie Elliot has an MA in Creative Writing and a BA (Hons) in Literary Studies.  She has been longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award. . Fay Weldon described Annie Elliot as a natural writer and her work as ‘completely brilliant’. Nikesh Shukla said she had a ‘really great comedian’s eye for detail and absurdity’ and was struck by her talent for the acerbic and moving. Mr & Mrs Charles Dickens is her debut novel.