Lewis Carroll - 1979

AUTHOR:

Anne Clark

Clark's biography was the first serious study to be written after Dodgson's unexpurgated diaries became available for study, and she was the first biographer - and the last for some time - to make any use of this resource. This was the first biography to reveal the existence of the missing pages in Dodgson's diaries (though she only reported one of the seven), and the first to explore in any way Dodgson's friendships with adult women.

However, Clark's biography remains quite fanciful in many places. Clark believed wholesale in the 'Alice love story'and tended to invent or imagine 'facts' freely in support of this. Her text therefore cannot be described as wholly reliable, particularly on the subject of Alice Liddell.

SOUNDBITE:

All roads lead to Alice Liddell...even if they don't

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE:

Highly influential. Clark's vision of Alice Liddell as a unique love object in Dodgson's life (which she received from Taylor who of course had no evidence for it), is much quoted today and indeed featured as a source in Morton Cohen's recent claimed 'definitive' study.