My Dearest Kate

It is often difficult to believe that many historical figures were not what they seemed behind their façade of fame and respectability. Yet the man whose works earned him a reputation as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era hid the bleak reality of an increasingly strained and unhappy union to Catherine Hogarth, separating from her after 22 years, considering her to have become mentally disordered and an unfit mother. On her deathbed in 1879, she handed a collection of letters to her daughter Kate “so that the world may know that he loved me once”. These precious documents became the subject of this absorbing presentation.

This event takes place at Coach House Theatre