Alice, Creator and Destroyer

I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen. I’m not sure he was right. Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20 th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ –…