Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell

By Katie Roiphe

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9780440333852

Katie Roiphe

Katie Roiphe is an author and journalist writing about feminist issues. She is best known for writing The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, and In Praise of Messy Lives, as well as The Power Notebooks, and has contributed articles to prominent publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Paris Review, Vogue, and Slate. She has a PhD in literature from Princeton University and is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

Reviews for Still She Haunts Me

[waltzmn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I guess I missed the point.Isn't historical fiction supposed to be about what actually happened, only trying to guess and fill in the details we don't know? As opposed to "making up vile statements out of whole cloth," which is generally referred to as "slander"?I probably am not the target market for this book -- after all, I know some actual facts about Charles Dodgson, plus I am autistic (as Dodgson probably was), and I don't really understand the point of fiction when one could write a real biography. Others may not suffer those handicaps.But still -- it's so wrong! Flat-out factually wrong. Let's clarify: The plot of this book is about the (documented and seemingly correct) estrangement between Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and the family of Dean Liddell, including Alice Liddell, the "real Alice in Wonderland." The real reason for this estrangement -- which was real but not as extreme as described in this volume -- is unknown. Author Roiphe suggests that the reason was that Dodgson took nude photographs of Alice.There is good reason to think that Dodgson was not, in fact, a paedophile -- that his strange behaviors (and they certainly were strange!) came about because, as a person with autism, he had developed better social skills for dealing with adults than children. But that's only hypothesis. Perhaps he did lust after little girls.That still doesn't cure the errors in the book. Far too many. A smattering of examples:Page 3: At Christ Church, where Dodgson taught, a "student" was not "one who studies"; a studentship was a fellowship, entitling the holder to certain rights at the college.Page 10: When Dodgson met Alice, she was not yet four -- yet here she is playing croquet and asking about being lectured. (This, I'll admit, may be my error. At times Roiphe jumps around in time and perspective in a way I found hard to follow.)Page 36: Dodgson was not stooped; he was noteworthy for his extremely stiff posture. One of those who testified to this was Alice Hargreaves (the former Alice Liddell) herself.Page 52 quotes Dodgson as telling "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to Alice. Not possible. Dodgson hadn't even decided it was a "Carpenter" at that time -- he didn't decide on a carpenter (as opposed to a couple of other things) until Tenniel told him which would be easier to illustrate, more than half a decade after the break-up with the Liddells.Page 60: Dodgson "the only man in Oxford who didn't like the Dean"? Most of Christ Church was aghast at his appointment -- he was a reformer, and they didn't want to be reformed.Page 155: This is a story about how Dodgson came to use the name "Lewis Carroll" on the Alice books. But Dodgson had already used "Lewis Carroll" before that, and the story of how he picked the name is well known, and this isn't it.Page 166: Dodgson's diaries show that his faith in God was fervent and lifelong -- his heartfelt appeals to God in his diary show that. He lost his belief in eternal punishment, not his belief in god.Page 168: He was not a mediocre mathematician; his works on logic, voting theory, and determinants were al original and noteworthy. And he wrote useful notes on Euclid, although he refused to go beyond what Euclid taught. This was his one real weakness as a mathematician. He was not great as Euler or Gauss were great, but he would have been an asset to any mathematical research department. As for Lorina Liddell's snarl on p. 217, "What has he ever produced," this is both wrong (his list of publications shows that he did produce) and wrong-headed (Dodgson lived before "publish or perish").Page 176: We know from Dodgson's diaries that he did not take his first nude photograph until after his break with the Liddells. Nor did he take any without the parents' consent (although he sometimes angled hard for that consent). For one thing, it was too hard. These weren't snapshots; they needed good light, and a cooperative model, and a long time.Page 194: "Respectable children did not pose for naked portraits." That's not history; that's modern opinion. In Victorian times, children often did -- there is reason to think that many of Dodgson's nude pictures were taken at the request of the parents. It was adults -- sinful, fallen adults -- who were not photographed naked. Go ahead, start looking at Victorian poetry books, and see how many of them feature illustrations of naked children.I'm going on and on -- a trait I share with Dodgson. The point is, this book is false. The hypothesis doesn't hold water, and the supporting "data" didn't happen. Maybe it happened to someone else. But would you care if the people involved weren't "Lewis Carroll" and "Alice"? Problem is, they aren't Lewis Carroll and Alice. Whatever is the answer to the "Liddell Riddle," the greatest question in Dodgson scholarship, this is not it.

[abirdman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fictional autobiographical memoir of Lewis Carrol-- the "She" in the title refers to Alice, from Alice In Wonderland. Explores a possibly pedophilic relationship in Victorian England between a young instructor and the dean's daughters. Airy and thoughtful and sad.