Alice has inspired many artists, writers and filmmakers alike, being a representation of the uncommon child, heroine of a world only children and grown-up children can create through imagination. Twists and new forms of the story have been created, such as writer Eliza Wyatt’s award winning musical Alice’s World.

Eliza, who has just recently moved to Patcham, was just about to give up her writing when musician David Ingledew asked her to add a script to some lyrics and music he had composed. Alice’s World was successfully performed at Brighton Fringe Festival in May 2010. It then reached a bigger audience with the Colorado Moondance International Film Festival this summer, considered best script. However, Eliza has chosen to explore the myth through a more literary form. She has adapted the musical into a storybook for the modern child, Alice Leaves Wonderland.

Alice is stuck in a countryside cottage with her adoptive parents, the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit. All she wants is to go on an adventure. One day Dory, a boy who escaped his parents’ home, takes her on a trip to the bottom of the sea. Dying to tell someone about it, they head back home. But they experience the same despair as before, only worse. In a moment of deep longing Dory decides to go back to Alice.

Eliza shows that the barrier between the real world and the dream world is very narrow: both can intermingle. At the end of the story, Dory compares his world to the garden, in an explicit way that translates the author’s thoughts: “Believe me, it’s madder out there than it is in here.”

The roles of the characters are inverted. The Mad Hatter, a mathematician always trying to solve equations, is more childish than Alice herself. This appears unconventional as mathematics represent the square world of adulthood. Eliza cleverly assimilates him to Lewis Carroll, also a mathematician. He was able to combine the harsh reality of adults and the twisted, nonsensical dream world of children in one character.

In her article about the storybook, Eliza writes: “Alice is constantly able to extract herself from the confines of the ‘garden’ and expose herself to the elements, something the real Alice Liddell was never able to do.” There is a liberation which is symbolic for the child, and for woman. Eliza considers Alice to be an “incipient feminist heroine”.

The author shows through Alice’s world a humorous reflection of reality, that it is as arbitrary and insane as the little garden of every child’s mind.