Alice

A Victorian afternoon on the Isis, Lewis Carroll telling a story to the real Alice Liddell, and a girl falls down a rabbit hole and into one of the most influential books in English. The name descends from the Old French Aalis, itself a shortening of Adelais, from the Germanic for noble. It was worn by medieval queens, Alice Paul who marched for suffrage, Alice Munro who made Ontario kitchens into literature. The name has quietly climbed in the U.S. over the past fifteen years, currently at 62 and given to about one in 458 girls. Two syllables; a hundred and fifty years of literary weather.