Alice I Have Been

Melanie Benjamin

Hardcover, $25

Delacorte Press

January 2010

368 pages

This is really a lovely and original novel, a fictional retrospective based upon the real life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the actual little girl who inspired Alice In Wonderland.  Like all children, even Alice had to grow up.  This book is the result of the author’s imaginings about what it might have been like to be an adult Alice, a perpetual disappointment to those seeking a young, blond little girl and a woman plagued with doubts about her own memories.

The book was inspired by a real photograph taken by Henry Dodgson (pen name, Lewis Carroll) of the “real” Alice.  Dodgson was an Oxford mathematician, amateur writer, and photographer, primarily of little girls.  Scandal swirled around him though nothing conclusive has ever been proven.  However, his evocative photography and the whispers of impropriety make for an intriguing novel, particularly since little more than the bare, skeletal facts of his and Alice’s lives are known.  In this story, octogenarian Alice looks back upon her restrained Victorian childhood, her flawed marriage, her confused memories, and wonders just which Alice she really is–the little girl in Wonderland, the dutiful daughter, the married lady, the aging matron.  Her journey to self discovery is no less poignant and a good deal more heartfelt than her trip down the rabbit hole.