Trivia / The Lonely Doll

• Accent On The Wrong Syllable: As the Edith doll grew older and more fragile, Wright created an identical doll to serve as Edith's stunt double. The replica was named "Replica," with the stress on the second syllable: rep-LEE-ka
• Missing Episode: Edith and Big Bad Bill is the only Lonely Doll book allowed to go out of print. In it, there is a not-too-subtle Racism Is Bad lesson when Edith learns everyone is frightened of Big Bad Bill because Bill's fur is a different color. While the ultimate takeaway from the book is well-meaning (all people are alike under their fur; sometimes people who seem mean and scary are just afraid of being rejected), its lessons and imagery have not aged well. It's also possible that in the rise of awareness of Stranger Danger, a book that encouraged children to seek out and befriend strangers because they might be lonely wasn't such a great idea.
• Practical Effects: At the time, people were astonished at how Wright managed to get such lifelike poses from her inanimate subjects and assumed that some photo-manipulation must be involved. It wasn't. People were often shocked at the dissonance between Wright's sentimental presentation of Edith and her often ruthlessly practical methods for getting the photos. (For a scene in which Edith has a thermometer in her mouth, for example, Wright simply cut a hole in the doll's mouth, inserted the thermometer, then sewed the hole closed later.) However, in one interview in which a reporter pressed for Wright's secrets, the reporter teasingly asked "They're really alive, aren't they?" to which Wright grinned and replied, "You've found us out."
  • Worth noting that when Wright did experiment with photo-manipulation in her fairy-tale book Lona, the results were still eerily realistic. Remember, this was all done pre-computer, meaning that Wright achieved these effects by manipulating the images by hand while developing the photos.
• Self-Insert Fic: It's generally accepted that Edith is an allegory for her creator Dare Wright, who purposely modified the doll to resemble herself. By all accounts, Dare had an unhappy, isolated childhood (and adulthood), never married, and spent the majority of her life as a companion to her possessive mother. The two lived together (even sharing a bed) from Dare's early childhood until she was well into her fifties, when her mother died. Wright's mother's name? Edith.
  • This backstory becomes more poignant with the final book, Edith and the Duckling, where the lesson the Lonely Doll learns is that her pet duckling has grown up and must be set free.