Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - Lewis Carroll - was a distinguished Oxford mathematician, clergyman and pioneering photographer. He was also a shy, eccentric man with a pronounced stutter. The exact nature of his relationship with his muse, Alice Liddell, remains a mystery. It was a relationship characterised by a deeply obsessive love, typical of the nineteenth century, and so profound and complex that it led to the creation of one of the most imaginative works of all time, Alice in Wonderland. Katie Roiphe's vividly imagined and compassionate portrait of this relationship has tried to explain what happened to cause the rift between Dodgson and Alice Liddell's family which occurred when Alice was eleven, and, in doing so, she has created a bold, intelligent and compulsive piece of fiction.