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The Strange Case of Opal Whiteley
1897-1992
By Mike Bonner
Just over a hundred years ago, the twenty-two year old Cottage Grove prodigy Opal Irene Whiteley rocketed to national
and international fame by publishing her child's diary, entitled THE STORY of OPAL - The Journal of an Understanding Heart.
Not many cases of literary celebrity, followed by a furious dismissal, are stranger.
To the present day, the book that brought Opal notoriety has fans and detractors, based on the fact that many believe
it authentic, while others believe (or strongly suspect) it is an elaborate literary hoax.
There is a third category which maintains that while the diary is the authentic product of a childish hand, Opal may have
touched it up before The Atlantic, managed by editor-in-chief Ellery Sedgwick, serialized its first 70,000 words in six installments
before it appeared in book form.
Opal visited Sedgwick's office in New York initially to submit a different book she'd written and illustrated, The Fairyland
Around Us, but this book Sedgwick did not like. However, on learning that Opal had kept a childhood diary, Sedgwick was intrigued.
Opal told Sedgwick she began her diary at age six and continued through her teenage years. It still existed but had been torn
to shreds by her sister.
The number of paper pieces was in the thousands and were stored in a hatbox in Los Angeles. Sedgwick had the hatbox shipped
to New York and put Opal up at his mother-in-law's while she pieced her diary back together.
There are photographs from this period showing a dark-haired, dark-eyed Opal surrounded by sheets of paper with block
printed lettering. The contents of the diary describe a girl's outdoor adventures in a rustic setting. Calling herself Francoise,
the narrator makes friends among whatever she finds, including toads, mice, trees, and even yellow jackets, whom she describes
as the world's first paper makers.
There are some unintentionally funny moments, such as when Francoise notes that a local couple was happy the Angels brought
them a baby "real soon,only five months after marrying." And Francoise spends a lot of time hunting for fairies,
as in this passage:
"I went to look for the fairies. I went to the near woods. I hid behind trees and made little runs to big logs. I
walked on the logs and I went among the ferns. I did tiptoe among the ferns. I looked looks about. I did touch fern-fronds
and I did have feels of their gentle movements. I came to a big root. I hid in it. I did so to wait waits for the fairies
that come among the big trees."
Despite the dreamy and idyllic character of the prose, it is not a happy story.
It is apparent the people Francoise considers her foster parents regularly thrashed her for the crime of inattention to
whatever chore they wanted done. The person Opal calls the mamma liked to shove her under a bed for an indeterminate stretch
before dragging her back out to beat her.
As with anything pertaining to Opal's life, her birth and background are clouded with confusion and speculation. Family
members said Opal was the eldest child of Charles and Mary Elizabeth Whiteley, born in Washington State December 11, 1897.
The family lived in a series of logging camps, typically in poverty, following the jobs Charles did before moving to the southern
Willamette Valley, settling outside Cottage Grove, near a farm Mamma's father owned. In Opal's diary, Mary is the woman she
calls "the mamma."
Around the time Opal began composing her diary, she was rapidly earning a reputation as an amateur naturalist. In school,
she was two years ahead of her class. A sympathetic teacher named Lily Black recognized Opal's abilities and arranged for
books to be lent to her from the Oregon State Library's new inter-library loan service.
Opal's reading helped inform her choices in the names of the animals, wild and domestic, she made it her business to befriend.
Opal's study of nature was so precocious that when she joined Christian Endeavor, a then-popular youth ministry, she was soon
giving well-attended lectures about the plants and animals of Oregon.
Opal's lectures caught the attention of Elbert Bede, a writer for the Cottage Grove Sentinel and the Oregonian, who praised
her in a series of articles.
On leaving high school early, Opal briefly attended the University of Oregon before going to Hollywood to pursue a position
in the fledgling movie industry.
The movie career did not pan out but Opal managed to find some wealthy benefactors, who supplied funds for her to self
publish The Fairyland Around Us. This project failed to gain traction as well, primarily because the printer found Opal difficult
to work with. But having a handful of copies already, Opal began sending them out in hopes of finding a potential publisher.
In 1919, Opal made her fateful journey to New York to seek publication for The Fairyland Around Us, which was both a serious
study and a hymn to the natural world.
Opal had no luck until she met Sedgwick, who said: "About Opal Whiteley herself there was something to attract even
a man of business,something very young and eager and fluttering like a bird in a thicket."
When The Story of Opal appeared, it was a bestseller, but the follow-up reaction was swift and savage. A host of opinions
derided it as fake, mawkish, overly sentimental, and insipid. Within a year, it went from bestseller to joke. Ellery Sedgwick
abandoned Opal and she eventually moved to England, where for a while she was feted and supported by patrons who despite all
still admired her diary.
Throughout her life, Opal claimed to be the offspring of French royalty, the daughter of Henri of Orleans, who had somehow
passed her over to the Whiteleys to raise. Among mistreated children, especially sensitive, imaginative ones, indulging in
the orphan fantasy has distinct appeal. Most grow out of it. But Opal, in all probability autistic, did not.
Opal became irreparably delusional and obsessed about her genealogy living in England, and experiencing the Nazi Blitz
bombardment during World War II cannot have been therapeutic. She was discovered by British authorities in a hovel near starvation
and was persuaded to admit herself to the Napsbury mental institution in 1948, where she would spend the rest of her life,
dying February 16, 1992.
As for the diary, one of Opal's biographers, Benjamin Hoff, supports the authenticity of the diary by pointing out that
it's a lot of trouble to compose a document of nearly a quarter million words and then tear it up in hopes of getting it published.
More evidence is in the determination that the crayons used to compose it on butcher paper were proven to have been manufactured
before World War I.
We will likely never know for certain if Opal's diary is the work of a child genius or a clever ruse perpetrated by an
ambitious young author. In the end, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that however the diary was created, The Story of Opal exerts kind of a mystic sway over readers that can't
be denied, not even a century plus later.
And however sad were the circumstances of Opal's life and her experience with literary fame, her book will long be revered
by people who don't reject sentimentality, who can imagine a world hidden from the senses, and who still want to believe there
are kindly fairies all around us.
Notes:
1) The Story of Opal -- The Journal of an Understanding Heart is available for free on line in a variety of formats at
Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43818/43818-h/43818-h.htm
2) A life size statue of Opal Whiteley, by sculptor Ellen Tykeson, greets visitors at the entrance to Cottage Grove. Oregon's
Public Library.
3) One of the few original copies of The Fairyland Around Us still in existence is in the University of Oregon's Special
Collections division.
THE END
Mike Bonner of Eugene is the author of MAVO -- High School in the 1960s, Freshman Year, a comic memoir of a Portland,
Oregon USA adolescence. His current project is a book about Basketball cards for middle school readers.
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