Customer Reviews

Alice I Have Been: A Novel

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Summary:

Alice Liddell Hargreaves is an lonely old woman now, but once she was full of passion, fire, and true love. As a child, she was the muse of Mr. Dodgson, a professor at Oxford who used the pen name Lewis Carroll, and inspired the seminal classic that has been read and loved by millions. What Alice doesn't realize, though, is that her life will be both illuminated and shrouded by just one day in her life, a day when, at eleven years old, her life changes forever.

Review:

Alice I Have Been is a beautiful and incredibly written book that is difficult to describe. It's hard to pinpoint why it is so wonderful because there isn't just one reason; the book as a whole is expertly crafted. Melanie Benjamin's writing is simply sublime; it is the thread that holds the entire narrative together. It is fluid, poetic, and entirely alluring, drawing the reader into Alice's story and making sure they stay there until the book is over.

The depiction of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is both fascinating and disturbing. While he isn't explicitly portrayed as a pedophile, he definitely has an inappropriate relationship with Alice. There is an emotional connection between the two that is very difficult to comprehend and entirely disquieting. Benjamin manages to show it with dignity and grace, something that is very difficult to do with such a perturbing subject. By showing the friendship through the innocent eyes of Alice, Benjamin manages to turn something sinister into a childhood affection, without removing its disturbing quality.

Alice herself is an incredibly interesting character that is expertly written. She is naive and innocent at times, but also incredibly aware of how the world works. She lives her entire life in the shadow of a book that features her, yet sometimes seems to be not about her at all. It's up to Alice to rediscover the girl inside her, especially in the face of tragedy and despair.

I also appreciated how closely Melanie Benjamin stuck to Alice Liddell's real history in Alice I Have Been. Though this isn't exactly a historical novel, she has a long Author's Note at the back of the book in which she explains what is fact, what is fiction, and what parts of the book blur the lines between the two. It's very gratifying that Benjamin chose to stick that close to true events; it's clear that she undertook a lot of research before embarking on the journey that was Alice I Have Been.

Alice I Have Been is an incredible story that literary fiction fans won't want to miss. It's not necessary to have an intimate knowledge of Lewis Carroll's books in order to understand the book, though I'm sure it's helpful in appreciating its subtlety. Some background on Carroll/Dodgson is helpful, though a quick perusal of he section about Alice on his Wikipedia page is all the information you really need. It's an incredibly creative and well-written book that I can't recommend highly enough.

Alice I Have Been is the story of Alice Liddell, the "real" Alice in Wonderland. She met Charles Dodgson at the age of seven, and helped inspire his classic children's novel. Later, she supposedly had a relationship with Price Leopold, one of Queen Victoria's sons (never definitively proved; the author gives it much more importance than it might actually have been), married an English country gentleman, and had three sons.

I have mixed feelings about Alice I Have Been. On the one hand, it's a well-written and evocative story of a young woman's growth to adulthood. It kept me engaged all the way through, and the book had almost a magical tone to it. On the other, I felt that there definitely were some weaknesses.

The author takes a lot of liberty with the known historical facts. First, it is still debated about what really happened to cause the break between Dodgson and the Liddels. Melanie Benjamin attempts to fill in the blanks; and while she makes an admirable effort, I didn't, in the end believe it all. I also thought it odd (but this may have simply been a Victorian thing) that nobody thought that there was anything strange about Alice's relationship with Dodgson--even after the now-famous beggar girl photograph was taken (though it really is a haunting photograph).

The parts of the novel where things are purely fictional (as with Alice's supposed relationship with Prince Leopold, or the scenes with John Ruskin, who comes across as a lecherous, mad old buffoon here) are weaker, while the stuff that's based purely on fact is much, much better. When Alice meets Peter Llewellyn Davies in America, I felt that the author gave too much of a fatalistic importance to the meeting.

I enjoyed Melanie Bejamin's writing style immensely, but she has a habit of repeating herself in places (in once scene towards the end she mentions no fewer than three times that it's May!), and she suffers from bad word choice sometimes (as in, "me legs were as numb as my other senses." Maybe that's true, if ones legs are now the sixth sense...), and she uses Americanisms in several places. In addition, the author tends to hit her reader over the head with her theme of growing up, or the lack thereof. This is a novel that shows a lot of great promise, but in my opinion needed a better editor.

This was a wonderful, poignant, heart-breaking book that will surely mean something to anyone who read Lewis Carroll's works in their youth. The "real" story, largely documented, of Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves unfolds in a first-person perspective, targeting three significant moments in her long life--her childhood encounters with C.L. Dodgson (Carroll) at ages 7 to 11, her young adulthood and ill-fated royal romance, and her later years of great strength and personal tragedy during and after World War I. While the decades-long narrative jumps may seem jarring at first, Benjamin provides plenty of flashbacks to flesh out the narrative. This approach provides the reader with plenty of tantalizing mini-mysteries that are resolved as the story moves forward, piece by piece.

And what emerges is a beautiful, tragic portrait of a literary inspiration and her enigmatic creator. Dodgson, so often judged by modern moral standards, comes across quite well in this novel, and I was very pleased to see that, by focusing solely on Alice's recollections, he remains shrouded in mystery, at least until a partial revelation in the novel's final pages. Naturally, of course, a large portion of the novel is devoted to the genuine question of his feelings towards Alice, made even more difficult to interpret today thanks to missing pages in Dodgson's famous diary (though this is not mentioned in the novel). All in all, I greatly enjoyed this story and highly recommend it.

Melanie Benjamin's "Alice I Have Been" is a delightful book for all kinds of readers, those who are members of "Alice in Wonderland" fan clubs as well as those who like a historical novel, especially one set in Victorian England.

"Alice I Have Been," narrated by Alice Liddell Hargreaves, begins with the eighty-year old Alice coming to America to be feted as the little girl from Wonderland. American audiences are shocked to see an old woman, when they are expecting a little girl in a pinafore. It seems that no one wants Alice to grow up, especially Charles Dodgson, the author himself (aka Lewis Carroll), who lived near the Liddells on the Oxford campus where he taught mathematics and was rumored to be a boring, ineffectual teacher.

Alice remembers her youthful years, the golden days of stories and tea parties, row boats and picnics. Dodgson's presence at the Liddell house was a constant of her young life. Around the little girls, Dodgson is free to employ his dreamy imagination, telling nonsense tales. Alice feels special in his gaze, giving her something to lord over her older sister, Ina, and her younger sister, Edith. Though there were ten Liddell children, the trio of girls is the focus of Dodgson as well as of Alice herself, well into adulthood.

The photographs Dodgson left behind, of girls in costume, girls scantily clad, posing on grass or hillsides, are one of the issues Benjamin examines through fictitious scenes with Alice and Dodgson (the book carrries reproductions of the famous "gypsy" Alice photo). This book is FICTION; it is not biography or literary criticism. Benjamin uses the freedom of fiction to allow readers to see what might have been. Benjamin is extremely apt in setting scenes, using textures and scents, weather, and above all, Victorian dress. The layers of clothing that impede the children with every step and movement, the constant provoking to "stay clean" are motifs of the Victorian sentiments to keep children in an idyllic state of innocence.

After a disastrous day between Dodgson and Alice, witnessed by Ina, Alice moves on without him in her life by order of her imperious, society-obsessed mother. Then, Alice is smitten with love for Prince Leopold. Will her love be returned? How can it be when others at Oxford know all too well that Alice and Dodgson may have acted inappropriately in her youth? But that was such a long, long time ago, and she is no longer THAT Alice.

Or is she?

The novel closes with the Great War, its devastation on families and the economy of England. Alice has married, borne three sons, all of whom march off to war. Which if any will survive? How does Alice feel about no longer being the famous Alice? Should she step forward to claim her place in literary history?

Benjamin's book pulls the reader into the dream of another time, another place, with strong characterizations of the sisters; of the quiet, odd, stuttering man, Charles Dodgson; of his friend, Duckworth; of the strict nanny, Miss Pritchett; of the hemophiliac and poetic Prince Leopold; and of Alice's mother, Mrs. Liddell.

If you love "Alice in Wonderland," you will find a wealth of interesting allusions: to the garden and the keys and the Queen of Hearts (and more). If you love historical fiction, get ready to settle in for a journey through the classrooms, households, celebrations, and desperations of Victoriana. "Alice Have I Been"
enriches readers and amuses them too.

In his photos of young girls, Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) used his photographic talents to immortalize two particular poses. One is the girl asleep, innocently provocative, with her ankles and sometimes her feet bare, her hem disarranged. The other is the girl awake, looking at the camera with a serious face and eyes fixed in a cool, measuring, powerful gaze. There are exceptions; nudes, the occasional ghastly smile or thunderous scowl. But the most successful portraits all feature that cool, almost grim stare. Whichever girl is modeling, however she'd dressed, whether seated or standing or enframed in a composition with other family members, it is this adult gaze that arrests the viewer. And it is the interpretation of this gaze on the part of Alice Liddell that bothers me the most in Alice I Have Been, a fictional attempt to understand the real-life relationship that gave birth to Alice in Wonderland.

Other reviewers have summarized the plot of the novel, which neatly fills in the biographical details of the real Alice's life. Her childhood was enchanted and enchanting, and Dodgson was a fixture in it, squiring all the Liddell children around the countryside outside Oxford, where their father was Dean. It is an interesting view of Alice, but the author's view of Dodgson as a romantically viable and hotly contested object of desire, battled for by Alice, her older sister and their governess--it is troubling. Alice at age seven years is portrayed as the seduced and the seductress, luring Dodgson with her perfect ability to be his "child-friend." She loves him, asks him to wait for her, presses herself intimately to him, desires him with all her heart until a disruptive event breaks the spell she casts with her childish mouth.

Is her attitude a result of pedophiliac grooming? One would assume so, but that is not the stance of this novel. This Alice is completely sexualized of her own accord, even though her Victorian upbringing has left her with gaps in her knowledge of the physical side of life. Her famous "gypsy-child" photo is an immortalization of a moment when she steps up and claims an adult woman's perogative with Dodgson, the expression on her face that of knowing she has won his passion completely.

Isn't it more likely that Dodgson created that gaze (using Alice and other models through the years) through posture and technique? Children have been coaxed into unwittingly erotic poses in photos for years, and to extrapolate this conclusion from that photo troubles me. Is it really believable that Alice was the aggressor, the pursuer at age seven, nine, eleven? No one can know, of course, we are all just speculating. And the idea that 'scandal' followed her through the rest of her life does not appear to be documented anywhere else. It's transgressive, titillating, and disturbing to have any child portrayed this way.

On the whole, the book is well-written. But the story feels too constructed to ring true. This is fiction, so that's forgivable. But the idea that a child is a seductress? That's really not forgivable.

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

Who was the real-life Alice in Wonderland immortalized by Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson? In Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin, we see her as an irrepressible child, then a young woman who falls in love with a prince, and finally a mother and wife.

Alice I Have Been is an expertly woven story of Alice Pleasance Liddell's life that spans the Victorian era to the first World War. The first part, as told through a very young and irrepressible Alice's eyes, is delightful. Benjamin captures her "voice" perfectly as an adventurous and outspoken child who's always getting into trouble. I thoroughly believed that this spirited little girl inspired a shy mathematics professor to tell and later write down a strange and fantastic tale based on her. Alice's privileged life in those days is described as a golden wonderland of boating trips down the Thames and being spun stories by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll.

However, as is the Wonderland of the book, there is something a bit strange about the friendly Charles Dodgson. Benjamin treats Dodgson, a stammering, child-like adult who is constantly in the background of the Liddell family' lives, delicately. It is well-documented that Dodgson took many photographs of the Liddell children, especially the three girls, including Alice (the most famous of which is shown above - Alice Liddell as a gypsy girl). There is something startlingly adult in this little girl's gaze - as if a woman was staring out her eyes. Looking at Dodgson's barefoot muse, with a thin blouse off her shoulders, one has to wonder, what exactly was Dodgson's motives?

"I felt it most when he looked at me as he stood behind his camera, holding the cap to the lens, counting slowly, his eyes never moving from mine as he exposed the plate. There was something about his eyes---the color of the periwinkle that grew at the base of the trees in the Meadow, such a deep blue---that made me feel as if he could see my dearest wishes, my darkest thoughts, before they made themselves known to me. And that simply by seeing them, he was also giving me permission to follow them. Perhaps he was even showing me the way. For I wasn't very comfortable with the dark thoughts---muddled nameless thoughts---that sometimes came to me when I relaxed my watchfulness."

Did Dodgson have an obsession of photographing little girls? Was he a pedophile without knowing it? What happened to create a rift between the Liddells and Dodgson so that he was never allowed to associate with them again? What did he write in the many letters he sent to Alice, which her mother later destroy? Did Dodgson ask for the 10-year-old Alice's hand in marriage?

Benjamin answers some of these questions and leaves the rest half-illuminated. The odd figure of Dodgson is not presented in a black and white fashion. As a mother, such scenarios raise red flags for me, but the compelling way Benjamin tells the story of Alice and Dodgson kept me from turning away in disgust. Benjamin handles the subject matter very well so that when Alice's childhood and her association with Dodgson ends, it is as if I too have left Wonderland.

The rest of the book dealing with Alice as a young lady, a mother and wife, and then as an elderly woman looking back over her life is no less passionate than the story of her fabled childhood. The grownup Alice is courted by a prince, but even then, her fairy tale life turns dark. Mimicking the famous story that bears her name, Alice has to navigate treacherous tea parties with a very famous Mad Hatter-like adversary. Forever after she will have to deal with the scandal of her youth and the burden of being Lewis Carroll's Alice.

I like the complexity of Alice as she changes throughout the book, as well as the range of well-written characters, and the richly drawn Victorian setting. With echoes of the original classic, Melanie Benjamin's debut novel is an impressive imagining of what the real-life Alice might have been like.

This fictional life story of Alice Liddell, who as a little girl inspired Lewis Carroll's enchanting classic Alice in Wonderland, is a grand idea that could have been a wonderful book. The writer certainly did her homework, did plenty of research, and came up with a good framework: the book begins with Alice as an old lady, looking back on her childhood.
But the book needed a better writer. I'm sorry, but the writer's style is just dull. Because this is something of a literary mystery I kept plodding on, turning pages, hoping to find something I didn't already know about Alice and her Mr. Dodgson (Carroll's real name). It just doesn't happen.

Once upon a time, in Victorian England, a young girl with many sisters, an emotionally unavailable mother, and a curious drive for adventure--and attention--becomes the object of a shy, stuttering mathematics professor's needs of his own.

Rowing in the lake, playing on the grass, posing for photographs--all of these adventures lead to one day when Mr. Dodgson, as he is called, spins a tale of a little girl, bored to be sitting on the bank with her sister, follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit hole. And the rest, of course, is history.

Except for the part of what happens to Alice...after.

It is awhile before the Professor writes the story down for Alice, as he promised...and even more time before it becomes "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and Dodgson becomes "Lewis Carroll."

This story, Alice I Have Been: A Novel tells us about that after. How the young girl, poised in childhood during one unforgettable time, cannot forget...ever. Tongues wag, as gossip trails her wherever she goes. A potential romance with a handsome prince is thwarted at the last moment because of the "tainted" image of a young girl...used perhaps? And what other dirty little secrets might there be?

This story was so fascinating, with its blend of truth and fiction, that I simply could not put it down. I longed for a "happily-ever-after" for the woman who had been Alice in Wonderland.

You will just have to read it to find out. But you can probably guess...life seldom turns out in the fashion of fairy tales. Sometimes, however, there can be contentment and satisfaction. Which is what this tale provides.

Definitely a five-star read.

Who doesn't have a childhood memory of Alice In Wonderland - the book or the Disney movie or both - few works of literature are so widely beloved. Benjamin's tale, told from the viewpoint of an elderly Alice looking back on a life lived in the shadow of her childhood self, was a poignant and engrossing look at the life of Alice Liddell, the 'real' Alice in Wonderland. I never knew more than that the book was inspired by a real girl - reading this novel made me want to learn more about the history of the original work.

I think Benjamin truly captured the essence of Alice's voice throughout the book, as an adult looking back at herself, her family and friends and trying to remember the people and events she has spent most of her life trying to forget. I felt for Alice, trapped in a house with an austere, uncaring mother, a distant father and a manipulative older sister; she was always the odd one out, struggling to find her place. She knew she didn't fit in; she knew that she was different, that she viewed the world differently than her peers -- it was this difference, which she longed to celebrate, that drew the attention of Charles Dobson and set in motion a chain of events that would change Alice's life forever.

This novel was a great read, a story about a story that I've always wished to further understand. Though the complete truth about the relationship between Dodson and Liddell will never be known, this well-imagined tale captured my interest and also my heart. One of the best books I've read this year - I highly recommend it.

I really can't say enough about this book. I have always loved anything to do with Alice in Wonderland, but had no idea it was based on a real person. If I had known, I would never have guessed that the real Alice and Lewis Carroll were anything like this. The book has just enough of a hint of something not quite right between the two of them without making you too uncomfortable. I feel like I know Alice really well after reading this book, but I'm still really curious about Lewis Carroll. Although the book is a historical novel, it is not hard to read at all and it think part of what makes it so easy to read is kind of like what Alice says about her sister's book in the beginning of Alice in Wonderland about "what good is a book without conversations" (or something close to that). The book is written mostly in dialog and I really love that. Still you get a real sense of what the Victorian age was like for young girls growing up. I also love that so much of the book takes place at Oxford University where Alice's father is the dean and you get a sense of that lifestyle also. I can't imagine anyone being disappointed in this book. It is a great story that I will never forget.