To: Adventurous
From: Literary Muse
Date: New Release
Subject: Wonderland

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."

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.

Question & Answer with Melanie Benjamin, the author of Alice I Have Been
Were you a fan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a child?
A: Surprisingly, not really. I don't recall reading the book, although I know that at some point, I must have. I really only knew the Disney movie, and what I knew of that mainly came from riding the Mad Tea Party ride at Disney World.

What drew you to writing a novel about Alice Liddell, then?
A: I saw an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago several years ago, titled "Dreaming in Pictures: the Photography of Lewis Carroll." I did not know that Lewis Carroll was a pioneer in photography; I did not even know that Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Certainly I had no inkling that there had ever been a "real" Alice! Once inside the exhibit, however, I was startled by the images Carroll—Dodgson—had taken; they were all prepubescent little girls. One photograph in particular captured my fancy; it was of a girl clad in rags, staring at the camera with a very frank—very adult—gaze. The caption informed me she was 7-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of Dean Liddell of Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson taught mathematics. The caption also said she was the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Read more Q & A with Melanie Benjamin

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