As a literary biographer and critic, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has been drawn to writers who are maestros of metamorphosis. His books Becoming Dickens (2011) and The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World (2021) each focused on a transformational period in the novelist’s career.
His The Story of Alice (2015) captured Charles Dodgson’s transition from a buttoned-up mathematics don into Lewis Carroll, the chronicler of Wonderland and life through the looking-glass. Both authors, as Douglas-Fairhurst keenly appreciates, have a spectacular flair for fictional transmutations. Dickens alchemises people into comic or sinister grotesques. Carroll’s Alice books are fiestas of change — freakish shrinkages and enlargements: a neck sprouts like a beanstalk, bodies flatten into playing cards.
Read more at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-riveting-account-of-how-ms-changed-the-life-of-an-oxford-don-5v5j3zz75
