The Real Alice in Wonderland

I keep thinking I'm going to feel 100% any moment now because I first got sick two long weeks ago and yet still, something is not quite right. It's all very frustrating.

I did read Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin in the midst of all this illness however, and I enjoyed it immensely. The basic facts of the Alice in Wonderland biography are here: Alice Liddell Hargreaves was the inspiration for the famous book, her father was dean of Christ Church, Oxford and that was how the family came to know Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). Dodgson took photos of Alice and her sisters, he spent a lot of time with the girls and one afternoon trip he told them the Wonderland story and at Alice's urging later wrote it down. Then something happened between the Liddells and Dodgson and there was a brutal falling out and they never really spoke again. Later, Alice became very close to Prince Leopold (as in brother to the King and son of Queen Victoria) and they broke up - although they each named a child after the other.

Whew!

Benjamin takes all these facts, including Alice's eventual marriage and the birth of her three sons (sadly, two died in WWI), and folds them into a novel about her life that is enormously compelling. She writes about her complicated childhood as the daughter of a very important man (and one of the only married men at Oxford) and shows how difficult it was to stand out in such a big family. A lot of Alice's childhood struggles were ordinary and utterly predictable but the friendship she developed with Dodgson was something altogether different and just what it was about is a literary mystery for the ages.

Benjamin doesn't drop any major bombs here and she shouldn't; her restraint is perfect and lends itself well to this complicated history. What Alice did, what Dodgson did, what her sister and mother and father and everyone thought (and the source of their motivations) are handled with care and empathy. That is what makes Alice I Have Been so believable - you can see the history unfolding exactly as the story does and by the time Leopold comes onto the scene you are so caught up in Alice's life that you really wish the book would abandon the truth and give us the story we want (Alice as a princess!!).

And don't even get me started on the deaths of her sons. Brutal, absolutely brutal.

Melanie Benjamin has also written about Ameila Earhart and Mrs. Tom Thumb - if they are half as good as her treatment of Alice, then they must be read as well.