It was a real honor for me when Elda Rotor, an editor at Penguin Books, asked me to write the introduction to the new Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The edition is being published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Alice’s first appearance in print in 1865. With amazing cover art by Bakes, the book will hit stores in just over a month on July 7.
Alice I Have Been
I had not yet met Melanie Benjamin when I first read her novel Alice I Have Been. Since then we have become friends and I’ve had the pleasure of showing her around my Lewis Carroll collection. With Alice Liddell’s birthday last week (see last week’s blog) it seemed a good time to share my long review of her novel which was originally published in a small journal I edit called Lewis Carroll Review.
Of Muses & Alice
I don’t know if ever writer has a muse, but I suspect that in some way we do. We all have those triggers—whether they are people or topics or passions—that cause the words to flow and somehow make them better than they would be otherwise. I address the subject today because this is the birthday of one of literature’s more famous muses, Alice Pleasance Liddell, for whom Lewis Carroll narrated and wrote down his story that later became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He had told Alice and her sisters stories many times before the famous July 4, 1862 rowing trip on the Thames when he “sent his heroine straight down a rabbit hole.” Certainly Lorina and Edith Liddell might have been equally responsible for inspiring him that day, but he named his heroine Alice and he wrote out the story, in a manuscript book that is now on permanent display in the British Library, for Alice.