Lolita Unbroken

On Christmas Day 1952 in Gray Star, Alaska, Dolores (Lolita) Haze Schiller, the wife of Richard Schiller, dies in childbirth along with her baby girl. John Ray, Jr., the fictitious psychiatrist who wrote the 1955 foreword to Nabokov’s classic, uses this tragedy as a convenient way to tie up loose ends, but there is no reason we should believe more than half of his account. The baby, also named Dolores, lives and grows up knowing little of her famous mother and unwittingly becomes part of a stepfather’s plan to see history repeated. The daughter is not the mother however, and won’t be so easily controlled by her Humbert Humbert.