The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

by Sarah Weinman

“Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave. . . . I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you.” As Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin pointed out in his 2005 essay linking Sally Horner to Lolita, Nabokov fiddled with the case chronology. The cross-country journey in Lolita begins in 1947, an entire year before Sally Horner’s abduction. At that time, Sally would have been nine going on ten, matching the age Humbert cites to his Lolita instead of the age she was when Frank La Salle abducted her. It is clear to Dolinin that “the legal formulae used by [Humbert Humbert] as well as his implying that he, in contrast to La Salle, is really Lolita’s father, leave no doubt that the passage refers to the newspaper reports of 1950. . . .” In other words, the circumstantial evidence is right there in the text that Nabokov did, in fact, read about Sally Horner in March 1950, rather than retroactively inserting her story into Lolita several years after the fact.