Fanny Dickens

Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Lucy Powell tells the story of five brilliant women, all the siblings of renowned achievers in the arts and science, whose own success was overlooked – either by their own epoch, or by the annals of history ever since. Virginia Woolf famously reflected on the neglect of brilliant women with her fiction of "Shakespeare’s Sister".

The parents of Charles Dickens were so convinced that his sister Fanny would bring greatness to the family name that, unusually for the time, her education was privileged above her brother’s. Fanny was a gifted musician and one of the first women to win a place at the Royal Academy of Music. So, Lucy asks: why are Charles and Fanny not both remembered?

Produced by Debbie Kilbride
A Tempo & Talker production