In writing about one of the most "strangely interesting stories" he encountered in his long career as the editor and publisher of 大西洋月刊, Ellery Sedgwick observed that "to an editor open-mindedness is of the first importance. [But] there is a point just below credulity and very far above skepticism where his mind should stick and open not one jot further.无视自己的建议, in 1919 Sedgwick fell under the spell of a mysterious young woman from the West—or did she have a more exotic origin?

奥珀尔·怀特利来到波士顿的办公室 大西洋 1919年9月，带着她印刷的一本书, 但我想以常规的方式发表, 我们身边的仙境, which was, according to Sedgwick, "the fairyland of beasts and blossoms, butterflies and birds." Whiteley showed Sedgwick the copy of her book that she had embellished with her own drawings and which "bore a hundred marks of special loving care." While Sedgwick did not believe that it was a promising publication project, about Whiteley herself there was "something very young and eager and fluttering, 就像灌木丛中的小鸟."

蛋白石的故事

When Sedgwick found out that Whiteley claimed to have grown up as an orphan in at least nineteen lumber camps in the Pacific Northwest and remembered the surroundings of her childhood in great detail, he thought his next question to her was natural: had she kept a diary —and, 如果是这样的话, 这就是他想要发表的. Her answer was that she had, but it had been destroyed, torn to pieces by a jealous foster sister. “奇迹般地,她保存了撕碎的书页, and Sedgwick quickly installed her and her hatbox crammed full of thousands of fragments in the home of his mother-in-law in Brookline, 就在波士顿城外, where Opal embarked on the complex and laborious task of reassembling the diary. 什么出现了, 个月后, phoenix-like from the fragments was the fairy tale/natural history that Opal supposedly had written between the ages of six and twelve.

与Opal Whiteley密切合作, 在1920年3月到8月之间, Ellery Sedgwick published extracts from Whiteley’s reconstructed journal in serial form in the 大西洋，同年又出版了加长版 蛋白石的故事:一颗理解的心的日记. 奥珀尔的故事的发表引起了轰动. 的 story appealed to readers who became enamored with the tale of an exceptionally precocious six year old who had kept a diary filled with classical allusions and keen observations of the natural world around her—a "fairy" child who conversed with animals and trees—and the little people of the forest. It also provoked a very large number of queries regarding the diary's authenticity.

真正的欧泊·怀特利

尽管奥珀尔·斯坦利·怀特利已经成为国际名人, 她与现实的脆弱利记手机官网恶化了. She claimed that the "angel parents" whom she had lost when she was very young were an Orléanist pretender to the French throne and an Indian princess—not a Native American but the daughter of the ruling family of a princely state in the Indian subcontinent. After travelling widely amidst a furor of publicity about the veracity of her story and her claims that her natural history writings dated from early childhood, 怀特利在英国定居. Her "story" ended on a sad note; she spent the last forty years before her death in 1992 in mental hospitals. 塞奇威克一直照顾她，直到1960年去世.

埃勒里·塞奇威克文件

的 Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection of Ellery Sedgwick Papers includes correspondence, 照片, 以及与怀特利的书出版有关的其他材料, 蛋白石的故事. 埃勒里·塞奇威克与怀特利一直通信到1929年, although he found that the "dew of the morning" had vanished from the journal that she continued to keep. He kept track of her life and the continued interest in her story for much longer, 花了好几年时间和在俄勒冈州认识她的人通信, 也没见过她. Sedgwick's papers also include correspondence about how he later helped to establish a fund to care for her. 的 为《利记APP官网手机版》寻找援助 可以在我们的网站上找到吗. 的 photograph of Opal Whiteley reconstructing her diary displayed here is from the 埃勒里·塞奇威克摄影公司.