Name: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll
Rating: 3.666666666666667 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780312424923

Jean Nathan

The personal story of Dare Wright, the author of the children's classic The Lonely Doll, recounts her work in modeling and photography before she became a successful author, the tragic loss of her brother in childhood, her ill-fated marriage plans, and the debilitating influence of her controlling mother. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

The Search for Dare Wright

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll

Jeannette Ordas

This is definitely a fascinating, gothic story, but it could do with a better re-telling. The book gets bogged down in names, places, and facts that don't seem important, and the reporting gets clinical at times. But I guess it's hard to get all the information from someone who lived a life that was hard to know.

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

If you liked Grey Gardens, also starring eccentrics named Edith/Edie, then you will love the bizarre fantasy worlds of Dare Wright and her mother Edith Stevenson Wright. Dare was the author of "The Lonely Doll" series of children's books from the 50s and 60s starring her childhood doll, also named Edith, and whom she talked to like a living person and who stars in the books along with two teddy bears, a father and son, who get her into mischief and then punish her usually with a spanking in her frilly white underwear. Dare's mother Edith was an acclaimed portrait artist and together they lived a glamorous, indulgent life literally playing dress up and taking photographs of each other or, in Edith's case, painting portrait after portrait of her daughter. Dare emerges from this compulsively readable biography as a rather fey, ethereal creature too precious for the real world. In love with her handsome brother Blaine and never married, Dare fed off and thrived artistically through the relationship she had with her forceful, age-defying mother who made sure that Dare never really grew up, never had an adult relationship with a man, never quit talking to her childhood toys. All this despite Dare's captivating beauty and provocative posing whether nude on beaches or in diaphanous dresses that she sewed herself. That this story ultimately ends with Dare re-discovered alone and destitute in a hospital by biographer Jean Nathan is sad and perfect. Nathan, who had flashes of her childhood reading of "The Lonely Doll" and went on a hunt for a copy, found herself stumbling into a story that she had to tell about the books' author and the unsettling popularity of the books then and now. Literary detective work that never strays into armchair psychology despite the clearly Freudian issues at play in Wright's life, a fascinating portrait of a woman with extraordinary artistic talent which is part Peter Pan, part Alice in Wonderland, and part Alfred Hitchcock.

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll The Search for Dare Wright

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