Alice I Have Been

I felt this book was really two books: the book of Alice as a child, which could be a bit tedious and hard to relate to, and Alice as an adult which was reminiscent of Downton Abbey (I’ve become a bit obsessed, so the parallels were positive for me), and also profoundly moving. Before reading this book, I was vaguely aware that Lewis Carroll was whispered to have had some sort of inappropriate relationship with the young girl for whom he Alice in Wonderland. This book, a well done work of historical fiction, is the story of that girl, their relationship, and her life after Wonderland.

As I said, it felt like two books, and I nearly gave up while reading the first. Upon finishing the book, I determined my disenchantment with the earlier chapters, which focus on Alice Liddell’s childhood, may have largely owed to the higher degree of fiction present in these early chapters than in those that focus on Alice as an adult. As the author notes, while much is known about Alice’s adult life, her life as a child, including the break in relations between her family and Mr. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) is much less so. (Here, even – or especially – the little details nagged at me. Did her mother really refer to all maids as “Mary Ann”?) It was largely the engaging descriptions of Oxford life that kept me interested long enough to reach my reward: the later chapters, particularly those which find Alice amid the tumult of the Great War.