Alice I Have Been: A Novel
Melanie Benjamin | 2010-01-12 00:00:00 | | 0 | Fiction
This was a wonderful, poignant, heart-breaking book that will surely mean something to anyone who read Lewis Carroll's works in their youth. The "real" story, largely documented, of Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves unfolds in a first-person perspective, targeting three significant moments in her long life--her childhood encounters with C.L. Dodgson (Carroll) at ages 7 to 11, her young adulthood and ill-fated royal romance, and her later years of great strength and personal tragedy during and after World War I. While the decades-long narrative jumps may seem jarring at first, Benjamin provides plenty of flashbacks to flesh out the narrative. This approach provides the reader with plenty of tantalizing mini-mysteries that are resolved as the story moves forward, piece by piece.
And what emerges is a beautiful, tragic portrait of a literary inspiration and her enigmatic creator. Dodgson, so often judged by modern moral standards, comes across quite well in this novel, and I was very pleased to see that, by focusing solely on Alice's recollections, he remains shrouded in mystery, at least until a partial revelation in the novel's final pages. Naturally, of course, a large portion of the novel is devoted to the genuine question of his feelings towards Alice, made even more difficult to interpret today thanks to missing pages in Dodgson's famous diary (though this is not mentioned in the novel). All in all, I greatly enjoyed this story and highly recommend it.
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