"But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?"
Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.
That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.
For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.
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This is a fictional imagining of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the real life inspiration for Lewis Carroll's (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.
I liked how the story expanded into Alice's life as a wife and mother, and how she struggles with her sons growing up to fight in the first World War. It even looks at Alice as an old woman. Melanie Benjamin writes in character traits within Alice's family to show where inspiration for other characters might have come from -- Alice's mother being a social queen, but emotionally cold = Queen of Hearts; Alice's father always seeming to be late for something = The White Rabbit.
The only thing I knew for sure was that there was no escaping him; with the publication of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, which was what Lewis Carroll decided to call Alice's Adventures Under Ground, our lives were seemingly bound together for eternity. The book was an instant classic, and Mr. Dodgson dutifully sent me every edition, including foreign printings; when he published Through The Looking-Glass, he sent me that as well. In his odd, indirect way, he persisted in dedicating both books to me. What was I to make of that? That I remained, forever, a child of seven, courtesy of the man who had caused me to grow up sooner than I had ever wished? I'd spent years trying to figure out this last, most confounding puzzle of his. I doubted I'd ever be able to solve it. Still, he haunted me. Everywhere I went; everyone I met. Hist eyes, his words, were upon me always. Alice In Wonderland. I would never be anything but.
I like how straightforward Alice was, particularly young Alice asking her governess "why does the wart on your face have a hair in it, but not the one on your hand?" or "why do we wear white dresses to go play in the garden?". The filter goes up a little bit as Alice ages, but not by much!
I also appreciate how the story does somewhat speculate on what might have happened between Alice and Charles, as far as the pedophilia rumors go, but makes it murky enough to remind the reader that this is all speculation. As the author points out in her afterword, the only thing that is known for certain is that Dodgson was a good friend of the Liddell family, teaching mathematics at the school where Alice's father was the Dean, but when Alice reached age 11 (Charles was age 31), something happened that caused all communication between Dodgson and the family to cease. Alice was forbidden from any more visitations. No one knows for certain the reason why (other than perhaps any surviving members of the Liddell family -- whatever happened is not common knowledge anyway). It's also known that after his death, someone in Dodgson's family removed pages from his diary, excerpts that might have possibly discussed the incident (but again, this is only speculated -- all that's known is that pages were removed).
"I once thought you the most practical of my daughters, Alice, but now I wonder. You seem so desperate lately. So reckless."
Why was it, whenever I tried to shape my own destiny, I was considered to be acting recklessly?
There are other literary nods in this story -- Alice, as an elderly woman, meets Peter Llewelyn-Davies at one of her public functions, he was the real life inspiration for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Also, I don't know if this was intentional, but there were portions of the story that I found a little Austen-esque -- especially the scene where teenagers Alice and her sister Edith are discussing their beaus, which reminded me of the scene in Pride & Prejudice when Lizzie & Jane are discussing Darcy & Bingley :-)
A very interesting, entertaining novel that made me very curious to pick up actual bios on Alice & Dodgson!
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