The eminent biographer Claire Tomalin wrote an entire book about Nelly Ternan, Charles Dickens’s mistress, condemned by the mores and straitlaced reportage of her times to never be seen with the novelist. Ternan’s story is only now slowly emerging.This oppression is the essence of Genius, a US-British semi-biopic of another species of invisibility — that of the editor, through whom a writer’s words are made acceptable to the public and the critics. A book editor, reporter, subeditor, proofreader ... the trade was once held in high repute, the masters’ names never proclaimed in social media or celebrity blogs.This is changing. Genius deals mainly with incidents in the life of Maxwell Perkins (Firth), senior editor at Scribner’s, to whom much of the creation of the last-century American canon is accorded. Among his clients — or fellow-workers — were Scott Fitzgerald (Pearce), Ernest Hemingway (West) and Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with Tom Wolfe). Wolfe neglects his young mistres...
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