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Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin Find this book in our catalog

One day in Oxford in the summer of 1862 Alice Liddell and her older sister went on a picnic with the Reverend Charles Dodgson, a trusted friend of the family. To enliven their regular expeditions together, Dodgson, who used the literary name Lewis Carroll, was used to telling the girls fantastical made-up stories. This day he told the story of eleven-year-old Alice, who fell down the rabbit hole. Alice Liddell just knew that this story about a girl who didn’t want to grow up was her very own story, and she begged Dodgson to write it down. Eventually Dodgson did and had it published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the well-beloved children's classic. He gave Alice Liddell the first copy, but by then there had come about a break in relations between himself and the Liddell family.

That was the real-life genesis of Alice in Wonderland. No one to this day really knows what caused the break between Alice Liddel and her friend. Melanie Benjamin has made a wonderfully readable novel about what might have been.

Alice I Have Been is a fictional account of Alice's life both before and after the break. It is the story, told by Alice herself eighty years on, of what it meant to her life to have been Alice in Wonderland: to have been forced to grow up and to be kicked out of Wonderland.

This is a finely-wrought and nuanced novel with many layers. Alice Liddell as portrayed here is a passionate, precocious, free-spirited child. The descriptions of her privileged life among the academic and artistic elite of Victorian society add richness to the background and also are a part of the story. Victorian social mores and the upper class attitude to children are very important to what happened to Alice. Just what happened is difficult to pin down because Alice, of course, sees everything through the eyes of a child. The author does a great job of eliciting our sympathy for Alice with her emotions, passions, childish frustrations, pettiness and immature understanding of the adult world. At the same time Alice can sometimes seem unnaturally precocious and knowing. At times what happens can appear to be hectic and dreamlike.

In fact, as she tells it, Alice has actually forgotten the circumstances of her familys break-up with Dodgson. Some little-understood but traumatic incident occurred that was wiped from memory. Certainly it was never openly spoken of, though gossip and rumor combined to blight Alice’s life as a young woman, and later as a wife, and mother. It takes old age to enable Alice to come to terms with who she is. Hers is a compelling story: an intriguing tale about love, jealousy, betrayal, self-delusion and the nature of reality

Labels: Alice in Wonderland, children, compelling, dreamlike, fantastic stories, fathers and sons, intriguing, jealousy, literary fiction, love, mothers and daughters, reality, Victorian