Still She Haunts Me, by Katie Roiphe
Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2001
Still She Haunts Me, by Katie Roiphe, is a disturbing look into the even more disturbing relationship between Lewis Carroll, and Alice Liddell, the child-muse who inspired Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. While much of the book is Roiphe's personal imagination of the psychological processes and inner voices of Carroll and Liddell, Roiphe has based her book on many of the "facts" that are known.
Fact: Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a very close friend of the Liddells, the family of the Dean of the college at which he was a professor.
Fact: Dodgson was an avid photographer and took innumerable pictures of the Liddell family, but primarily of Alice, who was only three years old at the time he met her.
Fact: Dodgson photographed Alice in various costumes in private sessions .
Fact: When Alice was eleven, the family broke off all relations with Dodgson, and pages from his diary that might have explained the schism have disappeared.
Real events are intertwined with conjectured thoughts and dialogues in what proves to be a fascinating read, even if you discount the verity of Roiphe's interpretation and simply consider the book to be a work of fiction.
If you are in doubt of the questionable nature of Dodgson's photos of Alice, here is one of the photos, which figures prominently in the book.
