In writing about one of the most "strangely interesting stories" he encountered in his long career as the editor and publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, 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." Ignoring his own advice, in 1919 Sedgwick fell under the spell of a mysterious young woman from the West—or did she have a more exotic origin?

Opal Whiteley arrived at the Boston office of the Atlantic in September 1919 with a book that she had printed, but wanted to have published in a regular fashion, The Fairyland around Us, 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, like a bird in a thicket."

The Story of Opal

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, if so, that was what he wanted to publish. Her answer was that she had, but it had been destroyed, torn to pieces by a jealous foster sister. "Miraculously," she had preserved the shredded pages, and Sedgwick quickly installed her and her hatbox crammed full of thousands of fragments in the home of his mother-in-law in Brookline, just outside of Boston, where Opal embarked on the complex and laborious task of reassembling the diary. What arose, months later, phoenix-like from the fragments was the fairy tale/natural history that Opal supposedly had written between the ages of six and twelve.

Working closely with Opal Whiteley, between March and August 1920, Ellery Sedgwick published extracts from Whiteley’s reconstructed journal in serial form in the Atlantic, and then published an extended version of it the same year as The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart. The publication of Opal’s story was a sensation. The 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.

The "Real" Opal Whiteley

Even as Opal Stanley Whiteley became an international celebrity, her tenuous connection to reality deteriorated. 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, Whiteley settled in England. Her "story" ended on a sad note; she spent the last forty years before her death in 1992 in mental hospitals. Sedgwick continued to contribute to her care until his own death in 1960.

The Ellery Sedgwick Papers

The Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection of Ellery Sedgwick Papers includes correspondence, photographs, and other materials relating to the publication of Whiteley's book, The Story of Opal. Ellery Sedgwick continued to correspond with Whiteley until 1929, 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, spending years corresponding with people who had known her in Oregon, or met her in the years since. Sedgwick's papers also include correspondence about how he later helped to establish a fund to care for her. The finding aid to the Ellery Sedgwick Papers is available at our website. The photograph of Opal Whiteley reconstructing her diary displayed here is from the Ellery Sedgwick Photographs.