After Alice was published by William Morrow in 2015, and it is Maguire’s engagement with Lewis Carroll — the most canonical and most analyzed of all English-language fairy-tale authors. The novel tells two parallel stories: below ground, Ada (a friend of Alice’s, mentioned in passing by Carroll) follows Alice into Wonderland and has her own surreal adventures; above ground, the adults of Oxford — including a young American visitor named Lydia — enact their own version of Wonderland’s absurdity through the rituals of Victorian social life.
The underground chapters mimic Carroll’s logic games and linguistic play while adding Maguire’s characteristic moral complexity: Ada, unlike Alice, is physically disabled (she wears a corrective iron brace), and her experience of Wonderland is shaped by her body’s limitations. Wonderland’s disregard for the rules of physical reality is, for Ada, both liberating (she can move freely) and terrifying (the familiar constraints that keep her safe are also removed).
The above-ground chapters are quieter and more satirical: the adults’ conversations about Darwin, about faith, about the proper education of children mirror the nonsense of Wonderland in a gentler register. Maguire suggests that Victorian adult life — with its rigid conventions, its elaborate proprieties, and its absolute certainty about things nobody could possibly know — was its own form of Wonderland, no less absurd for being taken seriously.
Collecting After Alice
First edition (William Morrow, New York, 2015): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Signed copies: $15–$35