Novels
- Alice I Have Been (2009)
- The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb (2011)
- The Ambassador’s Daughter (2013)
- The Swans of Fifth Avenue (2016)
- The Girls in the Picture (2018)
- Mistress of the Ritz (2019)
- The Children’s Blizzard (2021)
Collections
- Grand Central (2014)
Novellas
- Reckless Hearts (2015)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Novellas Book Covers
Melanie Benjamin Books Overview
Alice I Have Been
Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling. But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?Alice Liddell Hargreaves s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only Alice. Her life was permanently dog eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year the golden summer day she urged a grown up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories. That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war. For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire. From the Hardcover edition.
The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb
In her national bestseller Alice I Have Been, Melanie Benjamin imagined the life of the woman who inspired Alice in Wonderland. Now, in this jubilant new novel, Benjamin shines a dazzling spotlight on another fascinating female figure whose story has never fully been told: a woman who became a nineteenth century icon and inspiration and whose most daunting limitation became her greatest strength. Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead, I would define it. She was only two foot eight inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia Vinnie Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P. T. Barnum, married the tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century, and transformed into the world’s most unexpected celebrity. Here, in Vinnie s singular and spirited voice, is her amazing adventure from a showboat freak revue where she endured jeering mobs to her fateful meeting with the two men who would change her life: P. T. Barnum and Charles Stratton, AKA Tom Thumb. Their wedding would captivate the nation, preempt coverage of the Civil War, and usher them into the White House and the company of presidents and queens. But Vinnie s fame would also endanger the person she prized most: her similarly sized sister, Minnie, a gentle soul unable to escape the glare of Vinnie s spotlight.A barnstorming novel of the Gilded Age, and of a woman s public triumphs and personal tragedies, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb is the irresistible epic of a hero*ine who conquered the country with a heart as big as her dreams and whose story will surely win over yours. From the Hardcover edition.
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