Opal: A Life of Enchantment, Mystery, and Madness

by Kathrine Beck

Book Overview

In 1920, readers across America fell in love with the childhood diary of Opal Whiteley, a young girl from a small logging town in the northwest. The diary, which chronicled Opal's adventures in the forests of Oregon at the age of seven, was hailed as a revelatory and mystical portrait of a child's relationship to God and the natural world. It became an overnight sensation, and Opal-beautiful, charming, and twenty years old-quickly became one of the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670031453
• ISBN13: 9780670031450
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Well researched and a good read

First let me say that while I reside in Oregon, I do not consider myself an "Opalite". I have read most of the books on her and find this woman, along with others with various personality disorders, very fascinating. In the first half of the book, I thought Ms. Beck was overly critical of her subject, always trying to disprove Opal's stories. As I read further, I discovered that Ms. Beck really did her homework, and manages to bring strong evidence against most of Opal's outlandish claims. For me, this doesn't take away from the strong appeal of her diary. I personally don't care what age Opal was when she wrote it, I find it magical and captivating just the same. I think that Opal truly believed the stories she told, it was just a part of her mental illness. I don't believe that she deliberately tried to con anybody. I would recommend this book, as it's nice to see an author hunting down the truth. I love Benjamin Hoff's book as well, but sometimes it's nice to get the "real" picture, and not just the "rose colored glasses" version.

just the facts, maam

Reading what others have written about the book, here and elsewhere, I wonder if we read the same book. I found the author very sympathetic to her subject, if sometimes blown away by the situations she was describing. She is very careful to include every side of a question. I,like Ms. Beck, find Opal a fascinating subject. I enjoy her (Opal's) writing. There is definitely something there. This does not prevent me from being able to separate hard evidence from wishful thinking and subjective opinion. Opal disciples write off the book and I think it is because they do not find what they want in it. There have been outrageous misrepresentations, such as one assertion that Beck implied Opal was a "harlot." She did no such thing. She wrote somewhat clinically about Opal's mental problems. This struck me as a possibly overdone objectivity. It would be impossible to read Opal's story and not be deeply touched by her difficulties. Beck is frank about the patronizing attitude of the Boston Brahmins. She does NOT claim that Opal hoarded paper and crayon in advance of perptrating a hoax; rather, she points out thay owners of actual fragments of the manuscript have refused to have them analyzed, saying in the clinch that "it didn't really matter." No one doubts that Opal's long institutionalization was a horror, or that the experimental treatments of the day were barbaric. She makes it quite clear that opal's claims to French royalty are a complete delusion. There can be no reasonable doubt of this. Yet people want to believe it, because Opal herself believed it, yet these same people acknowledge her insanity. Over time, myth and legend have a way of overtaking hard facts, and this seems to be happening here. Most people interested in the story at all are already true believers. The triumph of magical thinking still doesn'tmake it so. End of rant.

Impressive research; pathetic writing

As a person who deeply loved the book I read 25 years ago (Opal's childhood diaries), I was entranced with all the info in Beck's book, & impressed with her research.But I have to say that the sloppiness of Beck's writing made me somewhat question the thoroughness of her research. What truly angered me, though, was that "Viking Press", associated with "Penguin Books", allowed a hardback book go to press with so many grammatical & syntactical errors! I often choose one book over another based on the reputation of the publisher, and until now, "Penguin Books" has represented for me the highest standard of quality.If you're wondering if I'm exaggerating the extent of the writing errors, I'll give you an example. But I have to tell you that this is just one dozens (I wasn't obsessed to the point of counting them) in the book. What is amazing about this sentence is that it occurs ON THE LAST PAGE OF THE BOOK, one of the first places where you'd think that the copy-readers would focus their attention! "Her greatest success may have been her work with children, many of whom who genuine learned a love of nature from her." And no, the mistakes aren't mine. It's verbatim from the book that my sister spent $24.95 for my Christmas present.

Flawed Jewel

Opal Whiteley front-loaded her life with some spectacular adventures before she was 30, with a few more to come after that. Without family connections, much formal education or any other advantages beyond a curiously compelling presence, she managed to hobnob with Los Angeles society ladies, Washington wives (at Cabinet level, no less, Indian potentates and English aristocrats. As author of a book that purports to have been a diary written in childhood (as well as a previous volume of nature study), she managed to parlay her oddly phrased memories into teaching jobs, stints as houseguest to Boston Cabots, the British Raj and Roman Catholic convent.With a miserable early life in Oregon put firmly behind her, Whiteley chose not to write about the bitterest truths of her upbringing: living for a time in a "house tent," attending a succession of schools, caring for several younger children while her father struggled to make a living as a logger and her mother died slowly of untreated breast cancer.Instead, she wrote in quasi-King James prose about her love of nature -- most likely the only beauty and privacy in her hard childhood. If she had left it at that, Whiteley might have had one of many futures -- offers to teach in Boston private schools, sponsorship to attend Wellesley College, contracts for other books.Unfortunately, she seems to have been an enfant sauvage in the East, where she went to make her literary fortune at age 20. There, the charismatic but inexperienced and unstable young woman was pulled in one wrong direction after another. Wishing, no doubt, not to own the hardships of her first 17 years or so, she started dropping hints that she was a changeling child, fostered to her Oregon family during some sort of intrigue that involved a family of pretenders to the long-deposed French monarchy. If she started out (during a California sojourn, during which she consulted at least one book with information about the family) merely playing with the idea of royal descent, the publicity surrounding the published diary seems to have driven her to embrace the "clews" to her mysterious birth as fact.From publication onward, Whiteley met an amazing array of early-20th century characters -- some who tried to help and ended up overwhelmed and others who exploited the fragile young woman. Editors (including Amelia Earhart's husband) cut her bad deals; a cult of rich pseudo-Episcopalian Theosophists made her a near-prisoner. On the other hand, Herbert Hoover's wife introduced her to Washington society, and a department-store heiress as well as nuns in two countries faithfully sent money for what was often her sole support.With a couple of exceptions, Whiteley seems to have formed no romantic relationships, rarely associated with people of her own age and cut herself off from family and most others she left behind in Oregon. Reading about her peripatetic life -- California boarding house to commune, to Cabot estate, to Greenwich Village, India and Lond

Brilliant biography of a literary opportunist

As a native Oregonian, I've grown up with the ridiculous musings of so-called Opalites who have swallowed the myth in one misguided gulp. Thanks goodness a writer of Beck's caliber has delved into the story with an objective eye and exposed Opal Whiteley as the "new kind of adventuress" -- a pioneer publicity hound -- she was. If Opal was around today she'd be peddling her wares with the likes of Tonya Harding, Amy Fisher and the Gabor sisters. The book held me spellbound. Funny thing, Opal would have loved that.