Reader of a quirky mind

Gaynor Arnold is enjoying a bit of recognition. After a 40-year career as a social worker, she is embracing her new role as feted author.

“It's quite nice when people I worked with over 20 years ago call me up to say they've read the book and really like it,'' she says.

Recently she was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Girl in a Blue Dress, a fictionalised account of Charles Dickens's harsh treatment of his wife, Catherine.

She was also nominated for last year's Man Booker prize. “I thought that maybe the Booker thing was a fluke because they often go for quirky, unknown things.

But another set of judges liking it makes me feel validated,'' she says. “Not that I don't think it's a good book, I hasten to add.''

Despite her nominations for two of the most prestigious literary prizes, Arnold, 64, has not given up her day job at Birmingham City Council, where she works on the recruitment team for adoption and fostering.

She started as a social worker in 1969 after leaving Oxford University.

After two years of social-work training, she married her husband, Nicholas. The couple have two children.

After marriage, Arnold moved to Exeter, where she visited some of the most deprived and dysfunctional households.

“I was endlessly negotiating deals to keep families who were in debt in their homes, bartering over tuppence a week here and there.

"But however dire the situation, the emphasis was on preventative work with families in difficulty and trying to avoid the break-up of a family and children coming into the care of an authority.

"I think that has changed a bit,'' she says. The job, she admits, became increasingly gruelling.

Since 1996, Arnold has worked in adoption and fostering but is still racked with doubt about the difference she made to children's lives in the earlier part of her career.

“Sometimes, when I dealt with young people in trouble ... And there was the feeling that your interventions weren't always effective. You never knew what might have happened if you hadn't intervened.''

She is equally dispirited by the all-time low that social workers have sunk to in the public eye.

“I would never minimise the seriousness of some cases but I do think all the bad press is very unfair and all the positive things social workers do never get any attention.

"Other agencies equally involved in a child's death don't get the vilification that social workers do.

"I'm not saying that social workers don't make mistakes but I don't think people understand how hard it is to make some decisions.''

Birmingham has been Arnold's home for more than 35 years. She lives in a large Victorian house on the outskirts of the city.

Recalling her childhood in Cardiff, she says: “We lived in this big rented house, with my parents, who were shop assistants, my grandparents, my aunt and her serial husbands. But I was the only child,'' she says.

The death of her father when she was 11 prompted Arnold to turn to fiction as a means of escaping her grief.

“That was when I first read David Copperfield, my all-time favourite Dickens and, for me, the book of a lifetime,'' she says.

“It encouraged me to read more Victorian fiction, a lot of which centres on the plight of orphans.

"Even though I wasn't an orphan, in a somewhat self-dramatising way, it was easy to slip into that sort of identification with the lonely, lost child.''

When Arnold was 10, she asked her parents for a typewriter to give free rein to her imagination: “I was prolific, churning out three plays a week.'' But she admits that “jobs, children and life'' then got in the way.

It wasn't until she joined a writers' group in the Nineties that she rediscovered her love of writing.

She wrote Girl in a Blue Dress drawing on her career for inspiration.

“I've found that there are certain themes and preoccupations that come up in both worlds,'' she says.

“Like the relationships between parents and children and the psychology of people and what makes them tick.''

Why did Arnold choose to expose her literary hero, who is more frequently remembered for his work with deprived children than his less-than-charitable care of his wife? “I was fascinated by the psychology of a man who believed in the virtues of home and hearth and family life but who could also behave so appallingly to his wife.

Might she retire early if she scoops the £30,000 prize in June? The question sends her into a fit of giggles, prompting protestations of “never in a million years''.