Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

Alice I Have Been
by Melanie Benjamin
Pages: 345
Published by Random House
Publication Date December 9, 2009
Source: Bought
Genres: Historical Fiction
Goodreads

Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole–and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?

Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do…”

Alice Liddell’s story does not begin on this “golden afternoon” but this particular day defines her as “Alice”. Melanie Benjamin has brought The real Alice’s life to light beautifully.

Mr. Liddell is the Dean of Oxford College. He and his family are living across from Charles Dodgson who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Mr. Dodgson grows a strong attachment to the Liddell girls, Ina, Alice, and Edith.  The girls crave his attention but grown-ups find his eccentric ways alarming and are skeptical on the closeness of their relationship.  The section on childhood slowly builds to the day Charles Dodgson tells a story of a girl named Alice with its muse begging the author to write it down.  But, like a fall down a rabbit hole the novel does not lose interest for the reader and for the remainder of her childhood focuses on the tight-knit relationship, ending with a sudden, unexplained break of the friendship.

The girl who chased a white rabbit down it’s hole has since grown up but, is still seen as Alice in Wonderland and begins to carry it as a cross as no one can look past and see the real Alice.  She begins to date Prince Leopold, now a student at Oxford with high promise of it ending in matrimony.  Yet the exclusiveness of her relationship with Lewis Carroll haunts her and goes to extreme lengths to hide it from Leo.  The ending of Alice’s young adulthood ends with tragedy, her younger sister Edith dies and soon after her mystery is revealed to the Prince and breaks all connection with the fairy tale.

Alice has now reached old age and is married to three boys but still cannot shake her persona and trembles at the thought of reading her story to her children.  Eventually, she owns that she will always be seen as just “Alice”  even though her life was not a Wonderland at all.

Part of the mystery, (although it has never been proven) is the accusations towards Charles Dodgson being labeled as a pedophile, having Alice as a romantic interest.  Throughout the novel, memories are surfaced, but as this is told by Alice being “too young to understand” is broken into fragments like a puzzle missing pieces.  Even though this brought an interesting quality to the novel, it was not overused tainting the tale.  Because in reality, who wants to believe that a beloved author such as Lewis Carroll was a dirty old man?

I really enjoyed this book and looked forward to turning on my Kindle each evening.  Alice I Have Been was very well written in a fairy tale sort of way, with characters developed so they seemed almost real on the pages.  Because indeed this was a story within a story, after completion I got online to learn more of the real persons in this historical fiction novel.  I was pleasantly surprised how accurate it was,  and what an extraordinary life Alice Pleasance Liddell truly lived.