Whiteley, Opal Stanley 1897–1992

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WHITELEY, Opal Stanley 1897–1992

(Opal Whiteley)

PERSONAL: Born 1897; died 1992, in London, England.

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1988, for The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley.

WRITINGS:

The Fairyland around Us, self-published (Los Angeles, CA), 1918.

(As Opal Whiteley) The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA), 1920.

(As Opal Whiteley) The Flower of Stars, self-published (Washington, DC), 1923.

Elizabeth Lawrence, Opal Whiteley: The Unsolved Mystery (contains The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart) Putnam (London, England), 1962.

Benjamin Hoff, editor, The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley, Ticknor & Fields (New York, NY), 1986, revised edition published as The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1995.

ADAPTATIONS: The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart was adapted by Robert Lindsey Nassif as Opal: A New Musical Adventure, Samuel French, 1993; and by Jane Boulton as Opal, Macmillan, 1976, revised as Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, Tioga Publishing, 1984, revised as Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, Philomel Books, 1995.

SIDELIGHTS: The life of Opal Stanley Whiteley, which spanned the years from 1897 to 1992, continues to fascinate her followers and biographers. This is in part because the absolute truth about Whiteley will probably never be known.

Whiteley was reportedly a child prodigy with an unquenchable thirst for learning. She spent much of her time in the woods communing with nature, and as a very young girl gave the barnyard and wild creatures elaborate names and sought refuge in a tree she called Michael Raphael. Whiteley entered school at age three and skipped two grades. At age six, she began keeping a diary, which she hid in a hollow log. A jealous sister ripped it to pieces, but when she was in her twenties Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick told Whiteley to bring the pieces to his mother's home, where they were reassembled. The diary was written phonetically in a childish scrawl, all in capital letters and with no punctuation. The book, which was published in a limited edition in 1920, brought Whiteley some measure of fame: it resulted in her being called a genius on the one hand, and a fraud on the other.

Whiteley was supposedly born in Oregon and raised in a logging camp, along with the five other children of Edward and Elizabeth Whiteley. However, in her diary, The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, Whiteley claims to have been born in France, where her actual parents had taught her to read and write, thus accounting for the French phrases that appear in her diary. She claimed that she had been adopted by the Whiteleys and was actually the daughter of French naturalist and nobleman Henri Duc d'Orleans. Following publication of the diary, the duke's family accepted their new American relative, but later disowned her, claiming her to be a fraud.

Following the original publication of the diary, skeptics charged that no child of six could have written such advanced prose. Whiteley's case was further damaged by magazine reports that claimed that she had admitted that her diary was a hoax. Whiteley's family, shamed and angered, disowned her. In 1920 her grandmother was quoted in a newspaper as saying that Whiteley "was always a queer girl." She talked about the whippings the girl received from her and from Whiteley's mother. The diary was out of print a year after its publication, and Whiteley left the United States for India, and then England, where she lived in poverty. Her mental health was fragile, a result of an inherited form of schizophrenia, and she was discovered, starving, in 1948 and placed in a London mental hospital, where she lived until her death.

In the Washington Post Book World, Bruce Brown maintained that Whiteley was, in fact, the French princess she claimed to be. "Both her biological mother and father—who may never have married—were killed in separate, nearly simultaneous incidents in 1901," wrote Brown. Françoise, supposedly Whiteley's real name, "remembers traveling with her nanny to see her grandfather ('Grandpére,' Robert, duke of Chartres), but somehow on the way the little girl was either lost or abducted, and launched on a crazy journey that carried her to the far side of another continent, and into another culture, language and identity." Brown noted other circumstantial evidence to make Whiteley's case, including the fact that the child wrote about all of the rivers that were in the vicinity of the home of the Duc d'Orleans.

In 1986 another Whiteley defender appeared. Benjamin Hoff, author of The Tao of Pooh, published Whiteley's diary, along with his commentary, as The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley. In a Chicago Tribune, article, Paul Galloway noted that Hoff "has used his skills to make a persuasive case that Opal Whiteley's diary is the real thing, written by an uncommonly bright little girl who was enraptured by the world around her and was able to communicate that rapture in a rare, beautiful and unusual way." Hoff spent three years investigating Whiteley's story. While he concluded that she was the daughter of the Oregon couple and that her alternate view of her past was a fantasy, he also believed that the diary was indeed her own work. Hoff includes in his book a sixty-six page introduction that contains a biography of Whiteley and a history of his research, as well as a thirty-nine-page conclusion.

Whiteley's life has been memorialized by a number of writers. Jane Boulton, who traveled to London to meet Whiteley, adapted the diary into verse in 1976. Boulton later collaborated with Caldecott medalist Barbara Cooney, who illustrated a version designed especially for children. Another writer, Robert Lindsey Nassif, created a musical based on Whiteley's life and diary. Nassif saw Whiteley in London on nearly a dozen occasions. She repeatedly told Nassif that she was pleased to hear about Hoff's book, but was not happy that he called her Opal Whiteley in the title. During their interviews, she continued to refer to herself as Francoise d'Orleans.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Beck, Kathrine, Opal: A Life of Enchantment, Mystery, and Madness, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

Hoff, Benjamin, The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley (includes The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart), Ticknor & Fields (New York, NY), 1986, revised edition published as The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Lawrence, Elizabeth, Opal Whiteley: The Unsolved Mystery (contains The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, Putnam (London, England), 1962.

Whiteley, Opal, The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA), 1920.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1986, Paul Galloway, "Mystery of a Little Girl's Diary," p. 1.

Horn Book, May-June, 1994, Mary M. Burns, review of Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, p. 338.

New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1976, Betty Jean Lifton, review of Opal.

Publishers Weekly, July 12, 1976, review of Opal; September 13, 1976, Robert Dahlin, review of Opal, p. 85; July 25, 1986, review of The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow, p. 177; January 17, 1994, M. P. Dunleavey, review of Only Opal, p. 35.

Washington Post Book World, June 16, 1985, Bruce Brown, review of The Story of Opal, p. 10.