Published in 1999
96 pages
Miriam Margolyes, OBE, has had a wide range of experience in television, film, and theatre work. Among her television roles are Miss Crawley in Vanity Fair, Edna in Supply and Demand, and appearances in three series of Blackadder. Other credits include Doc Martin and Merlin. She has played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress for The Age of Innocence and received an LA Critics’ Circle Award for her role in Little Dorrit. Her theatre work includes She Stoops to Conquer and her award-winning one-woman show, Dickens’ Women (which she co-wrote, with Sonia Fraser). She has also won Performer of the Year at the Talkies Awards. Miriam has presented the BBC documentary Dickens in America and created the role of Madam Morrible in the hit West End musical Wicked.
What is this book about?
A celebration of the singular female characters to be found in Dickens’s works
In his novels Dickens presents a series of unrivaled portraits of women, young and old. From Little Nell to Miss Havisham, these girls and women speak to audiences today, making readers laugh and sometimes cry. The popular British actress Miriam Margolyes will be touring the world in 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens birth, with a one-woman show about Dickens’ women, and this book accompanies the show by building on the script and expanding to include many more of the female characters Dickens described and analyzed so astutely in his novels. “Mrs Pipchin was a marvellous ill-favoured, ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face, like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard grey eye, that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.”
