Customer Reviews

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright

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Remember the seminal books of your youth? For journalist Jean Nathan, that book was THE LONELY DOLL. First published in 1957, with its pink and white gingham cover, this book featured photographs of a little blond-haired doll named Edith, and it put its author, Dare Wright, on the map. Almost 40 years later, with the book long since out of print, Nathan decided to find out a little more about its author. What she found saddened and shocked her.

First, she set about getting a copy of the book, which was no easy feat. After many attempts to locate Wright, Nathan simply opened the phone book and there was the author's address. It was with both anticipation and a little dread that she wrote to her. What if Wright was dead? Is it better not to know? Within a few weeks, she received her answer. Brook Ashley was a friend of the Wright family and explained that Dare was in a New York hospital on life support. Since there were no living relatives, Brook stepped in to act as her legal guardian. She was touched by Nathan's letter and began regaling her with the story of Dare's life.

Dare Wright was the second child born to Edith Stevenson and Ivan Wright in 1914. Both parents had artistic leanings. Wright was a failed actor and ultimately a theater critic, and Edith, known as Edie, desperately longed to study art abroad but was forced to abandon that dream when she married. Their first child was a son named Blaine. The family shuttled back and forth between Toronto and New York. Edie and Ivan's marriage was strained from the beginning and, after the children were born, quickly began to disintegrate. They divorced and Edie took young Dare and settled in Cleveland, while Blaine stayed with Ivan. Early on, the relationship between mother and daughter could best be described as oddly intense. Dare, being so young at the time of the split, was never told she had a brother and barely saw her father again. She learned of Blaine's existence much later, and the two got to be extremely close when Dare was a young woman living in New York City.

Because Edie was now a divorcee, Dare became her constant companion, accompanying her on trips to Europe and their annual summer jaunt to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Edie became a well-known and much sought-after portrait painter. Dare, who was always a beautiful girl, decided to move to New York City in the 1940s and pursue a career as a model. She did quite well, even gracing the cover of Cosmopolitan. Despite her steady modeling work, Dare always maintained outside interests, something she and her mother would practice on their many trips together. Dare picked up photography, probably from her mother, who frequently used Dare as a model, sometimes in provocative nude shots.

As she grew older and modeling jobs dwindled, Dare decided to create a children's book featuring photographs of her favorite doll, Edith, named after the most important and influential person in her life. Published in 1957, THE LONELY DOLL was a sensation and spawned a whole series that lasted into the early 1980s. Some of the better-known books include THE LONELY DOLL LEARNS A LESSON and EDITH AND MR. BEAR. The books often mirrored the loneliness and isolation Dare felt. With her controlling and all-consuming mother, her books were the only thing that she herself could control.

Nathan does a wonderful job of telling the story of Dare's (and by extension, Edie's) life and the complex relationship between mother and daughter, life and art. The intimacy, competitiveness, jealousy and loyalty that framed their lives paints a vivid but ultimately sad portrait of a woman who was never really free to live her own life and who found solace through her books. It's a riveting and well-researched book that engages the reader whether or not they are familiar with the book at its center.

--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

With out a doubt you are captured by the attention to detail of this book. Very hard to put down. Page after page of the extremely "Odd" relationship between mother and daughter. She can not seem to break away from this relationship, even for a moment. This is truly a rare and different type of story. One that will keep you guessing about just how deep the relationship is.

Memoirs to read: Nightmares Echo, Sickened,A Paper Life

I was interested in this book, because I am a doll collector and like the author Jean Nathan, I recall "Edith The Lonely Doll" from my childhood. I had no inkling of the strange and bizarre life of the author, Dare Wright -- presumably no one outside her small circle of friends and family could have known anything much about her. Without Ms. Nathan's interest -- remarkably she began investigating book and author just before Ms.Wright passed away enabling her to get photos and personal reminiscences that otherwise would have disappeared -- this would be a lost chapter in the history of children's literature. Bravo to Ms. Nathan for discovering and exploring this.

I simply could not put the book down. If Dare Wright's life were fiction, you would dismiss it out of hand as overblown, exaggerated and unbelievable. A beautiful model and gifted photographer, she lived in the shadow of her dominating mother (herself a hugely successful society painter) and was incapable of having a normal relationship with a man....excepting her obsessive, almost incestuous relationship with her brother Blaine.

As a child, I was fascinated by the Lonely Doll books although I never was given one to own. I must have read them at the library or book store, though, because I recall them very clearly. (Dare Wright produced sequels right up into the early 80s.) I was particularly fascinated by the concept of photographing dolls with props, which Ms. Wright accomplished with rare feeling and subtlety in black and white. I know as a youngster I tried to do the same with my Barbie's -- not an easy task! Ms. Wright had an very large and especially beautiful and photographic Lenci doll from her childhood to work with. Hearing the details of Dare Wright's astonishing and disturbing life makes the story of "The Lonely Doll" incredibly haunting and meaningful in a way I could have never seen it before.

There are a couple of books I recommend if you share my fascination with this: Lois Gould's "Mommy Dressing" about a very similar mother whose obsession with fashion and role playing was so destructive to the mother/child relationship. Anyone fascinated with dolls will also want to read Kate Summerscale's "Queen of Whale Cay", which is also about an eccentric woman who had an obsessive relationship with a large doll, who she dressed up and photographed much as Dare Wright did with her Lenci doll.

In addition, the remarkable and astonishing photographs that accompany the text in "Secret Life of the Lonely Doll" reminded me that the image of Edith the doll haunted me so much that at the age of 18 -- with my first earned money from a part time job -- I purchased not a stereo or concert tickets or clothes, but a Sasha Morgenthaler doll. Although no relation to Lenci, Dare Wright or Edith, the resemblance of these "Sasha" dolls to "The Lonely Doll" is astonishing -- same size, same hairdo, same gingham dress. I have never seen this resemblance commented on and I never even noticed it myself until I read this book....yet I feel quite certain that my purchase was spurred (like Ms. Nathan's of her literary subject) by some ancient memory of reading "Edith The Lonely Doll"!

This is the thoroughly gripping, utterly creepy, and ultimately tragic story of Dare Wright, her mother Edie, her doll Edie (Yes, the doll was named after her mother!) and Dare's creation of The Lonely Doll series of children's books popular in the 1950s-60s. Edie was also an accomplished portrait artist! Eccentric doesn't even BEGIN to describe this family dynamic. This mother/daughter duo often slept in the same bed, took numerous photos (many nude!) of each other, played an ongoing game of dress up and make-believe, and existed almost exclusively in a clinging calustrophobic fantasy world built for two. The parallels between Dare's life and her Lonely Doll books are chilling as is Edie's maniacal possessiveness of her daughter. It's very reminiscent of the 70s film documentary 'Grey Gardens'...only with a doll named after the mother but fashioned to physically resemble the daughter. A gripping chronicle of two enmeshed and unbelievable lives that left me in awe many times...Wonderfully weird...dolly dearest indeed!

As the bard wrote, "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Like the bandleader Billy Tipton, later revealed as a woman who successfully impersonated a man--children's book author Dare Wright was an American woman who fell outside of the normative bounds of sexuality. Judging from other reviews, some people have a hard time getting their minds around that idea...but,be assured, there is no 'repulsive' photography in this book, and the story is disturbing only because it reveals a sensitive female who did not receive the love she deserved.

Dare Wright was a resourceful woman who became independently successful on her own terms, and was attractive enough to have married several times over, had she been able to. She was prevented from doing so by psychological trauma. Like many creative people, she dealt with her personal demons by addressing them through her work. She achieved by her wits, and by 'sublimation', if you will.

This book is like its subject, unforgettable, as troublingly compelling as Alfred Hitchcock's film "Marnie", which also portrayed a tormented, but strong-minded female.

Only a reader with a hardened heart would feel no compassion for Dare, a remarkable person entrapped by her own personality. I came to this book having no familiarity with Dare Wright. Her photographs and her strange life are now etched in my memory.

Like others, I could not put this book down! If you looked at Dare Wright superficially you would think she had it all together, a beautiful model, photographer, author. But Jean Nathan wrote a fascinating and chilling story. The Lonely Doll books were among my childhood favorites and I have given an entire set that I collected over the years (with the help of Cathy Niswonger who is mentioned toward the end of the book) to my nieces. And they are not so interested in them! So my sister and I read them and recall our childhoods like it was yesterday.

One other point. The reviewer who mentioned the film Grey Gardens - do you recall the name of the two women in it? Big Edie and Little Edie! Kind of creepy after reading this book! I will definitely be keeping this one in my library.

In her prologue to 'The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright' (2004), author Jean Nathan states, "without expecting or even wanting it, I knew I had stumbled onto the exact thing that drive my entire professional life: a good story," and indeed she has: the book is both a labor of love and a mesmerizing biography of children's author, model, and photographer Dare Wright, an odd, multitalented woman whose entire adult existence was tightly and claustrophobically framed by a remarkable if unhealthy example of Freudian Family Romance.

Wright, who remained a virgin until being tragically raped by a vagrant in old age, willingly allowed herself to be dominated by her assertive mother, society portrait painter Edith Stevenson Wright, while most of the conventional romantic attraction she felt for the opposite sex was bestowed on her only sibling, brother Blaine Wright, who returned her ardor and devotion in full. Upon meeting Wright and her mother, some people thought them a lesbian couple rather than a mother and daughter, while Dare and Blaine, meeting again after over twenty years of separation, considered marrying one another and simply hiding their sibling relationship from the world.

As presented, the story of Wright's life continually approaches the pathological without ever irrevocably crossing the line; prevailing WASP social protocols, conventions, and mores of the era apparently protected Wright and her family from public as well as private exposure, though the preponderance of their friends seemed to sense something bizarre was occurring, decade after decade, without ever confronting the Wrights or asking the kind of impolite if common sense questions that would have exposed the family's incest-leaning eccentricities.

Nathan herself frequently seems strangely complicit in this peculiar arrangement; though she mentions that mother and daughter slept in the same bed whenever together throughout their lifetimes, it is only in a very late chapter that the reader learns that mother and daughter not only shared the same bed, but slept tightly wrapped around one another like newlyweds.

And while Wright, who never married, may have carried herself with poise and sophistication, the photographic evidence provided does not bolster the argument that Wright was a great beauty, though this seems to have been the prevailing consensus throughout her lifetime, and a belief Nathan shares. The occasionally repulsive photographs reveals a hard-featured, mannish woman who borders on the homely; in some photographs, Wright strongly resembles a transvestite, while in others, she projects a strident, imperious attitude that suggests a compensatory neurosis as well as a deeply rooted narcissism. Unsurprisingly, Wright's beloved alter ego, the toddler-sized doll "Edith," who starred in Wright's best selling series of photographic books for children, had the smallest nose imaginable, while Wright's was unmistakably large, thick, and upturned.

Wright and her mother professed to live happily in a fantasy world of their own creation, a brittle fairy tale world centered around private, all-night costume parties and compulsive photography sessions. This world quickly collapsed after her mother's death, when Wright sank quickly into lethargy, delusion, and alcoholism. Though Nathan encourages the belief that Wright genuinely suffered from painful social isolation throughout her adult life, the hard facts suggest that Wright lived an enviable life in many ways: she was friends with international social luminaries like Greta Garbo and Gayelord Hauser, was actively pursued by a number of handsome, dedicated, and well placed men, was financially stable, traveled freely around America and to Europe at whim, and seems to have had very little difficulty achieving success as a fashion model, commercial photographer, and author.

In fact, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll repeatedly begs the question of how Wright was able to achieve all that she did in fields not known for sensitivity and subtly if she was as paralyzingly timid, withdrawn, and introverted as Nathan claims. Wright was exceptionally talented, but talent and social connections alone cannot explain how Wright navigated the endless series of auditions, interviews, photo shoots, and business meetings that her multiple careers required over the decades.

The blond "Edith" doll was a multi-prismed reflection of Wright's fixation on her emotionally troubled childhood and broken home; while "Edith" was partially Wright's idealized doppelganger, the doll's name was identical with her mother's, who was known as "Edie" rather than Edith, and thus reflected Wright's unusually strong identification with and submersion in her mother. Throughout her adult life, Wright treated "Edith" like a living creature, conversing with "Edith" for hours on end and introducing the doll to visitors as if it were alive. Clearly, "Edith" was a fetish object of inordinate power and fascination for its owner.

As a recent article in the New York Times illustrates, some parents and educators today find the influential, recently reprinted Lonely Doll books to be politically incorrect at best and unwholesomely sinister and sadomasochistic at worst. As Nathan makes abundantly clear, the series did reflect Wright's own ominous psychological landscape, but were also clearly vehicles in which she could confront the complexes that ensnared her. Elements of ambiguity and conflict are necessary in all fiction, and each Lonely Doll book eventually achieves a helpful resolution of some kind. The series should be commended for not tacking on standardized, conflict-free happy endings.

Spanking, a prominent element in each book, was a commonly accepted method of parental discipline throughout most of Wright's life, and the doll's glamorized and slightly sexualized appearance is no different than the erotically charged decorative cherubs still common at Valentine's Day. Children's literature, from the works of George McDonald, Lewis Carroll, and J.M. Barrie to L. Frank Baum's Oz series and the Dr. Seuss books, have often contained ambiguously threatening elements to which children cheerfully respond; such elements are clearly intended to be correlatives to the sources of anxiety in the child's own life.

If Wright's personality ultimately remains elusive, Nathan has done an excellent job of documenting her concealed, secretive, and liminal existence.

My original copy of The Lonely Doll was without the jacket photo of the author and so I always assumed (because of the spanking scene, I guess) Dare Wright was a man. I never suspected the strange psychology of the writer belonged to a woman, and a knock-out blonde bombshell, born in Toronto at that. What was the impetus behind the book that left such a strong impression on the collective unconsciousness of so many women who read the book when they were little girls?

Jean Nathan does a good job of stitching together a life that was so unravelled. Were it not for the many photographs Dare Wright left behind, her biography would barely hold together--not because of the efforts of Jean Nathan, but because Dare lived such a vaguely etched life, as ethereal and remote as Edith and the bears.

This was a biography I read start to finish, returning again and again to the photographs in the text, then to my original pink gingham copy of The Lonely Doll and back to the text, trying to figure out at least a part of the enigma of Dare Wright. Just as the story of Edith stirred me as a girl, the story of the author is just as compelling, but strangely leaving me just as tantalizingly unsettled.

Dare Wright was a beautiful and tragic woman. This book could very easily have given in to pathos, or glossed over some of the more difficult aspects of its subject's life. It neither glosses over nor sensationalizes. One truly gets the sense of Dare, her mother and her brother as people who suffered trauma in life and, having been damaged, coped in the best way that they knew how.

My earliest memory of the Lonely Doll books is seeing a copy of "Edith and Big Bad Bill" for sale in a local Cleveland candy store, which did not normally carry books, but was clearly featuring this one due to the local interest. I was about five years old and was fascinated by the cover, which depicted Edith the doll tied to a tree. I wanted to know how she ended up that way and what happened to her. It was not all that different from my usual Saturday morning cartoon fare featuring ducks and bunnies pursued by hunters and teenage sleuths pursued by villains. My mother, however, detected something darker in the photo, refused to buy me the book, and spent some time exhorting me that that was not the proper method of playing with dolls.

Clearly my mother saw a darkness in the photo that eluded me. I later looked over some of the Edith books, including the one that had caught my eye, at the library, but for some reason they didn't strike a chord with me at the time. Although I do recall being a bit disappointed that Big Bad Bill was really not so bad and that he untied Edith without any daring rescue or further adventure taking place. :)

As an adult, I remembered the books and especially Big Bad Bill and decided to Google around for some information. I found the Dare Wright webpage a couple of years ago, and recently discovered that this book had also been written. I was expecting a more or less "normal" tale of a woman who had suffered depression or the tragic death of a fiance in the war. I was not at all prepared for the fairytale (in the Grimm sense of the word) that I found. I literally could not put it down. I only hope that in some afterlife, Dare and her family have mended their differences and are finally enjoying the happy sort of relationship she created for her alter ego Edith and the bears.

One detail of the story continues to bother me. It seems that the author and most of the readers of the book place most of the blame for Dare and her brother's dysfunctional upbringing, and subsequent difficulties, on the mother, Edith. Little or no blame is placed on the father, Ivan, who from all accounts not only had a severe drinking problem but appears to have been incapable of responsibly caring for his family. One shudders to think what might have happened to Dare's brother in her father's custody had not he happened to attract the affections of a loving woman who served as caretaker to both him and his son. It seems to me that Edith, while not entirely functional and certainly not blameless, did the best she could in a world that was even less friendly to single mothers than it is today. Even though she clearly didn't know how to be a good mother and made many mistakes, she also created opportunities for her daughter, sent her to a good school, put food on the table (not without a great deal of anxiety) and encouraged her the best way she knew how (not very good perhaps, but there is no doubt that Dare was loved). I think Edith, the mother, is more a figure of pity than hatred and that the father Ivan should have been examined a bit more critically; the author seems to present him as almost saintly by comparison, a status which he does not deserve.

Like many others, I first read "The Lonely Doll" at the library as a small child. I was an avid reader, and this book was checked out over and over with the Oz series and other classics. When I found a used copy five years ago, I started crying in the bookstore from happiness! Reading about Dare Wright's life has put it very much in perspective as to why children are drawn to her work. Certainly, people who had stable and happy childhoods should not be excluded from loving these books, but I find that anyone who has had to deal with a more complex upbringing is that much more attracted to the emotion on every page. Many children are scared that they will be left, and Ms. Wright's books offer assurance and comfort. It's absolutely tragic that no one could intervene on behalf of Ms. Wright who, clearly, needed this assurance for her entire life. Jean Nathan is very tactful when speaking of the relationships between Dare and others, and the book is as well researched as one could hope for given the circumstances. Bravo for Jean Nathan's labor of love, and for wanting to share this story.