Still She Haunts Me
Katie Roiphe
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 038533530X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a shy Oxford mathematician, reverend, and pioneering photographer. Under the pen name Lewis Carroll he wrote two stunning classics that liberated children's literature from the constraints of Victorian moralism. But the exact nature of his relationship with Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of his college, and the young girl who was his muse and subject, remains mysterious. Dodgson met Alice in 1856, when she was almost four years old. Eventually he would capture her in his photographs, and transform the stories he told her into the luminous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. Then, suddenly, when Alice was eleven, the Liddell family shut him out, and his relationship with Alice ended abruptly. The pages from Dodgson's diary that may have explained the rift have disappeared. In imagining what might have happened, Katie Roiphe has created a deep, textured portrait of Alice and Dodgson: she changing from an unruly child to a bewitching adolescent, and he, a diffident, neurasthenic adult whose increasing obsession with her almost destroys him. Here, too, is a brilliantly realized cast of characters that surround them: Lorina Liddell, Alice's mother, who loves her daughter even as she envies her youth; Edith Liddell, Alice's resentful little sister; and James Hunt, Dodgson's speech therapist, an island of sanity in Dodgson's increasingly chaotic world.
only a remote possibility, a book that might fall, a table’s sharp edge that might cut; she felt the invisible potential of the situation, the magnificence of the beggar-girl photograph, as a kind of heaviness in her chest. 4 Dr. James Hunt was tall and stooped, but his narrow face, with its prominent nose, thick eyebrows and small pebble-colored eyes, was nondescript. What was extraordinary about him was his voice, which rumbled through a room, low and rich. “Hello, Dodgson,” the voice came
scribbling a new equation, balancing various factors, to solve his relationship with Alice. That night he had a dream about Alice. He was sitting on a gold upholstered chair under a cherry blossom tree with Alice on his lap. He could feel her weight on his thighs, her leg swinging against his, the pain of her shoe digging into his shin, her hair brushing against his face, into his mouth, and suddenly her neck started growing. Her head was up in the trees, grown like a horrible serpent, twisting
chipped plate with a pattern of cabbage roses and a bottle of claret, reading the draft of Alice’s Adventures under Ground. Dodgson had tossed the manuscript on his desk as he was leaving that afternoon. A children’s story, he had said. The dedication page was written in large careful letters entwined with leaves: In Memory of a Summer Day. How odd to put it that way, Hunt thought. In memory of. As if the day, the summer, the people involved, had died. Hunt had told Dodgson how much he admired
Mrs. Liddell had called him when she discovered the photographs, because she knew that he had treated Dodgson, the way one might call a lion tamer when the lion has escaped from the circus. She thought he might know Dodgson’s habits, might be able to clarify the situation. Which for some reason was at once entirely obvious and entirely obscure. She seemed to want to be told what to feel. And when she discovered how easily and gently he heard her concerns about Alice, she decided that she wanted
of leaves. The wool blanket was spread out on the sloping riverbank. Dodgson lay on his side, propping himself up with his elbow. Alice was leaning against his legs, peeling an egg. Edith was sitting a little ways off pulling up grass from the dirt, and Miss Prickett was batting her arm to get her to stop. Mrs. Liddell was washing her hands in the river, and Ina was taking strawberries out of the large wicker basket and putting them on plates. Time seemed slippery and unmanageable. He felt
