Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

I learned a lot about the true story of Alice in Wonderland by reading this novel.  I like historical fiction where the author builds a plausible plot from documented facts.  It was neat to learn about Lewis Carroll's (potentially improper) relationship with a real life Alice that inspired the famous story.  I love when books make me Google to see whether something really happened.

Summary (from Amazon): 
Part love story, part literary mystery, Melanie Benjamin’s spellbinding historical novel leads readers on an unforgettable journey down the rabbit hole, to tell the story of a woman whose own life became the stuff of legend. Her name is Alice Liddell Hargreaves, but to the world she’ll always be known simply as “Alice,” the girl who followed the White Rabbit into a wonderland of Mad Hatters, Queens of Hearts, and Cheshire Cats. Now, nearing her eighty-first birthday, she looks back on a life of intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. First as a young woman, then as a wife, mother, and widow, she’ll experience adventures the likes of which not even her fictional counterpart could have imagined. Yet from glittering balls and royal romances to a world plunged into war, she’ll always be the same determined, undaunted Alice who, at ten years old, urged a shy, stuttering Oxford professor to write down one of his fanciful stories, thus changing her life forever.

Read: March 2013 via library