A Child Who Never Grew Up
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

To some, a doll may be an object of unconditional love. To others, they can be a little creepy; Freud connected this feeling to the notion that a doll might come to life. Dare Wright, contends Jean Nathan in her new biography (Henry Holt, 303 pages, $25), was a woman who wanted to be a doll.
Wright’s children’s book “The Lonely Doll,” and its subsequent sequels, were extensively popular in their time and, after a hiatus during the politically correct 1990s, have recently begun to be reissued. They tell the story of Edith, a lonely doll befriended by Mr. Bear and his son, Little Bear. Wright, formerly a model and then a staff photographer at Good Housekeeping, posed and photographed her own childhood doll and some teddy bears to illustrate her books. These tales frequently featured a spanking scene followed by reconciliation and a promise that everyone would live together forever and ever.
Wright herself was lonely, and Ms. Nathan argues that her books were works of serious self-expression, for Wright never really grew up. She photographed herself regularly, often designing costumes and decorating corners of her apartment for just that purpose. She was virtually inseparable from her mother, Edie, and together they played with dolls, decorated their homes like little girls, and slept in the same bed. Edie liked to photograph Dare naked.
Why Wright should have become so curiously withdrawn is the essential question of the book. Wright was by all accounts an uncommon beauty. Her physiognomy, dominated by an upturned nose, and her queen-like aspect, matched the glamorous sensibilities of the 1940s and 1950s (though to my contemporary eye her affect seems somewhat aloof and snobbish). She suffered numerous suitors, most of whom were rich playboys. She was taken fishing in a Cessna. She was introduced to Greta Garbo.
Wright became engaged for a short while to a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who ended up dying in a training accident after the war. After that, she hardly ever kissed a man. She lived alone in her apartment, with her mother as a frequent guest, and would have died a virgin had she not descended into a tragic haze after her mother’s death: Desperate for friendship, she befriended several denizens of Central Park, and some took advantage of her.
Wright was completely dependent on her Edie. Edie, a portraitist of some renown, had left her husband and son early in life, and was left with only Dare to cling to. She pretended to support Dare’s affairs but instead undermined them. Together, mother and daughter became old maids, perfecting a practiced childishness. When Edie died, Dare “had lost the armature of her identity; without the scaffolding her mother provided, it was all collapsing,” according to Ms. Nathan. As a friend observed, “I realized they had lived a fairy tale and now it was over.”
But it seems less a fairy tale than nightmare. Ms. Nathan reads the Edith books – none of which feature a mother figure – as an expression of the loneliness of Dare under her mother’s dominion. Ms. Nathan makes the obvious and necessary reference to Ibsen’s “The Doll’s House”: “Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot ‘do’; they can only be done by.” Perhaps this insight, taken with the spanking scenes, explains the observation that first intrigued Ms. Nathan in Wright’s life: “I knew I had once found this book deeply reassuring,” she writes early on. “Decades on, the book struck me as dark and a little troubling.”
Her subsequent investigation, however, does not indulge in scandalized reactions. “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll” is a remarkably calm and faithful biography. Not once does Nathan turn away from her subject to register the shock and incredulity most readers will feel. Wright’s story is worth telling because her neuroses were acted out with unusual literalness, her problems were drawn with bold lines. A penetrating meditation on her problems and her creativity would be fascinating, but Ms. Nathan has chosen to write a different kind of book.
Freud argued that the uncanny feeling dolls arouse in adults is a dull reflection of their childhood hopes that the dolls might come to life. Wright felt none of that adult shame, and Ms. Nathan does not impose it. Taking a child (or a woman-child) seriously can be hard work. But Ms. Nathan dexterous writing sees around the corners of Dare Wright’s life to show that behind her perhaps perverse books was a childlike effort at life that was both futile and bold.