The gestation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been told many times before, but in The Story of Alice (Harvill Secker), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has produced a biblio-biography that is crammed with lovely new things. He gets us far closer than we have ever been to the act of alchemy by which a shy and slightly creepy Oxford don turned a pert little girl into an enduring heroine of children’s literature. Parti cularly delicate is the way Douglas-Fairhurst deals clear-sightedly with the vexed business of Lewis Carroll’s sexuality without spoiling the lingering enchantment of getting lost in Wonderland.
Oxford also looms large in John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus), Ruth Scurr’s inventive account of the 17th-century antiquarian who, as the author of Brief Lives, has a good claim to be the first great biographer in the English language. Having been forced to abandon his alma mater during the civil war, Aubrey spent the rest of his life jotting down the kind of gossipy, scandalous biographical fragments that only circulate around high table after much port has been taken. In an act of daring ventriloquism, Scurr here tells Aubrey’s life story in his own words, stitched together from his scattered manuscripts. The result is a triumph of historical imagination, as vivid and endearing as its subject’s own.
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