LEWISTON — Bates College professor Lillian Nayder’s new biography, “The Other Dickens,” is the first in-depth portrait of the woman who Charles Dickens married and then repudiated.

Nayder will  discusses the book at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4, in the Lewiston Public Library’s Callahan Hall. Admission is free. 

Nayder is professor and chair of English at Bates. Scheduled for publication on Nov. 1 by Cornell University Press,”The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth” is the first comprehensive biography of Catherine Dickens, wife of the English novelist.

 The book explains that after 22 years of marriage and 10 children, Dickens pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered — unfit and unloved as wife and mother. The novelist’s version of events remains widely held, but Nayder’s book debunks it, demonstrating that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

 “Her story is interesting on a variety of levels,” says Nayder, “and I felt she deserved to have it told in a way that questioned Dickens’ own allegations about her, because they have been accepted even though there was plenty of evidence to suggest that they were false.”

 Drawing on personal correspondence, bank records and other documentary materials, Nayder paints the first well-rounded portrait of a figure heretofore known only as “Mrs. Charles Dickens” — a daughter, sister and friend; loving mother and grandmother; capable household manager; and an intelligent person whose company was valued and sought by a wide circle of women and men.

 Nayder also offers new insights into the relations among the four Hogarth sisters, and along the way draws larger lessons about family relationships and the legal and social status of women during the Victorian era.

 It’s telling, Nayder points out, that Charles used hypnotism, then called mesmerism, on his wife. “I focus on mesmerism as a motif for their marriage,” she said. “I consider the relationship between mesmerism and matrimony for Catherine, and that suspension of self that’s a part of mesmerism and was also a part of marriage at that time.”

 A Dickens scholar, Nayder is the author of “Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship,” published by Cornell in 2002. A resident of New Gloucester, she began teaching at Bates in 1989.