Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,Genre Fiction
Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell Details
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a shy Oxford mathematician, reverend, and pioneering photographer. Under the pen name Lewis Carroll he wrote two stunning classics that liberated children’s literature from the constraints of Victorian moralism. But the exact nature of his relationship with Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of his college, and the young girl who was his muse and subject, remains mysterious. Dodgson met Alice in 1856, when she was almost four years old. Eventually he would capture her in his photographs, and transform the stories he told her into the luminous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. Then, suddenly, when Alice was eleven, the Liddell family shut him out, and his relationship with Alice ended abruptly. The pages from Dodgson’s diary that may have explained the rift have disappeared. In imagining what might have happened, Katie Roiphe has created a deep, textured portrait of Alice and Dodgson: she changing from an unruly child to a bewitching adolescent, and he, a diffident, neurasthenic adult whose increasing obsession with her almost destroys him. Here, too, is a brilliantly realized cast of characters that surround them: Lorina Liddell, Alice’s mother, who loves her daughter even as she envies her youth; Edith Liddell, Alice’s resentful little sister; and James Hunt, Dodgson’s speech therapist, an island of sanity in Dodgson’s increasingly chaotic world.
Reviews
I don't think that any of us will ever know the truth about Lewis Carroll's relationship with the real Alice. This fictionalized account of their story, however, is aptly named. The legend and this story will also haunt the reader. Though a newer novel--Alice I Have Been--skirts around the idea of sexual abuse, this book confronts that supposition head on.Many critics have relegated Carroll to simply being a member of the Victorian cult of the child. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he simply craved the remembered but untouchable unknown of his youth, finding a way to recover it in Alice and other little girls (for more about this, see Robson's Men in Wonderland). It is possible and the idea of men recovering childhood through relationships with children certainly comes up often enough in Victorian novels. We will never know, but I am happy that this author doesn't try to run away from the possibility that the author of one of the best-known stories could have been a sexual deviant. In the end, regardless of what happened that resulted in Carroll being barred from the Liddell home, this novel is an artistic and well-written story that succeeds beyond the usual biofic.