Friday, 28 November, 2003

Opal Whiteley Here is web site I came across embedded in a MARC record Enchanted Fairyland. I was looking at a new book a biography of a forgotten, children's author, Opal Whiteley. I went looking from there to see if the library where I work had any of her works. Strange story. Her most well known work Diary of Opal was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1921. She presented it as a diary she had written when she was seven growing up in Washington state. The back story was that a jealous stepsister tore it all up, and she had kept all the pieces in a box until the editor of the Atlantic asked her if perchance she had a childhood diary they might publish. So she sent for it and glued it all back together. By this time she already had cultivated an image as a mysterious etheral nature child in a transcendental mode. Asking people to believe in a seven year old who kept a pig named Soloman Grundy and knew a tree named John of Gaunt seems to have been a step too far. 11:54:04 PM    comment [];trackback [];

© Copyright 2003 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 12/02/03; 10:40:10.