With its pink-and-white-checked cover and photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll, it captured the imaginations of young girls and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name.Ĭlose to forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. In 1957, a children's book called The Lonely Doll was published. If princesses could escape punishing circumstances, perhaps Dare could, too.Ī glamorous, haunted life unfolds in the mesmerizing biography of the woman behind a classic children's book

If princesses could be put to sleep and awaken unharmed, perhaps fathers and brothers could also. But the mechanics of fairy tales carried a message, too. The first two she purchased were a collection of Grimm's fairy tales and a picture book called The Lovely Garden, the story of the much-beloved Princess Yolande who lives on the Island of Can-be-done, whose 'sweet smile seemed to say: 'What am I here for if it is not to make others happier?'' The book's message was reminiscent of her mother's inscriptions on the backs of her portraits-'To my Good and Precious Daughter'-directives on how to act and so meet the conditions of Edie's love. If Dare's first dolls were improvisational, homemade, the books Edie bought Dare when she was feeling flush were the real thing. There, she learned to find comfort and companionship in her books and her dolls, and to fire up her imagination.

'I think that the reason that the books worked so well for children is in a sense they were written by a person who was a child herself.Mostly, when Edie had to be out in the world, Dare was left at home alone. Wright, who died in 2001, 'was working out many of the things that troubled her through these stories,' Nathan says. that then came out in these children's books,' the biographer says. 'All of her stories turn on aspects of her own childhood, the fears of punishment and being abandoned. 'I think that was the central trauma of Dare's life, losing both her father and her brother as a young child, and was something that stayed with her throughout her life,' Nathan says. Her parents were divorced when Wright was three years old, resulting in her separation from her older brother. Wright's troubled childhood was reflected in the Lonely Doll books. Nathan discusses Dare's life with NPR's Steve Inskeep.

Nathan has written The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, a biography of the late author and photographer Dare Wright, who created a series of popular children's books that scores of girls grew up with from the 1950s to the 1980s. The children's title featured photos of a doll named Edith and stuffed bears who looked so authentic that Nathan believed Edith was a real girl. When she was growing up, author Jean Nathan learned to read with a book called The Lonely Doll.

Dare wright and the lonely doll