Written by Abi Morgan, and based on the 1990 book of the same name by Claire Tomalin, the film is about the secret love affair between Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan, which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.

[5] In 1857,[a] while performing at London's Haymarket Theatre, eighteen-year-old actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan is noticed by the forty-five-year-old Charles Dickens.

He later casts her, along with her mother and sister Maria, in a performance of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep at Dickens's Free Trade Hall in Manchester.

No longer having feelings for his wife Catherine, who is busy taking care of their ten children and does not share his passion for literature, Dickens falls for the much younger actress.

One morning, Dickens slips out of Gads Hill Place, his country home, and walks to East London to see Nelly in a play.

After organising a reading and fundraiser to benefit London's "fallen women" and their children, Dickens invites the Ternans to his town house.

Dickens installs Nelly at a country house and promises to visit twice weekly, though acknowledges that his family has a claim on his time.

While watching her son perform in a school play, Nelly recalls the lines she spoke on stage in The Frozen Deep.

The screenplay was written and Mackinnon then approached a number of co-producers and directors before contracting Gabrielle Tana, who had worked with Fiennes on Coriolanus, his directorial debut.

[7]: 10  The actresses considered for the role of Nelly Ternan included Carey Mulligan, Abbie Cornish, and Felicity Jones.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Its deliberate pace will frustrate some viewers, but for fans of handsomely mounted period drama, The Invisible Woman offers visual as well as emotional cinematic nourishment.

[16] In his review on RogerEbert.com, Godfrey Cheshire gave the film three and a half out of four stars, calling it "a formidable achievement for Fiennes as both actor and director".

[17] Cheshire wrote that the story is told with "extraordinary delicacy and cinematic intelligence" and with a "finely calibrated poetic obliqueness that draws the viewer into the relationship's gradual unfolding".

It's almost as if he took Abi Morgan's screenplay ... and stripped away its most utilitarian dialogue, leaving only hints and suggestions of emotions that then must be fleshed out by the actors.

The method ... makes for a narrative that's constantly evocative, mysterious, almost impressionistic, and that involves the viewer in the pleasurably engrossing game of puzzling out the characters' aim and motives.

[17]Cheshire also praised the performances of the leading actors, including Fiennes who "creates an exuberant portrait of Dickens that encompasses his vanity and selfishness as well as his bounteousness and thirst for life", Jones who is "luminous" and "conveys the young woman's mix of awe, intoxication and anxiety as she is drawn inexorably into the orbit of a powerful older man", and Scanlan who shows Catherine Dickens' "dignity and grace in heart-rending circumstances".

The most entrancing and persuasive evocation of Victorian England offered in any recent film, it reflects superb work on the parts of many contributors.

[19] In his review in the New York Observer, Rex Reed called the film "a cogently written and elegantly appointed period piece that relates passages in his books to emotions in his personal life, holding the attention and shedding light on one of literature’s most fascinating footnotes".