Isa Bowman
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Isa Bowman (1874–1958) was an actress, a close friend of Lewis Carroll and author of a memoir about his life, The Story of Lewis Carroll, Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland.
She met Carroll in 1886 when she played a small part in the stage version of Alice in Wonderland with Phoebe Carlo in the title role: she replaced Carlo as Alice in the 1888 revival.[1][2] She visited and stayed with him between the ages of fifteen and nineteen: Carroll described a visit in July 1888 in Isa's Visit to Oxford,[3][4][5][6] which she reprinted in her memoir.[7] Carroll introduced her to Ellen Terry,[8] who gave her elocution lessons.[9] Carroll dedicated his last novel Sylvie and Bruno to her in 1889: her name appears in a double acrostic poem in the introduction.[10][11][12]
She married the journalist George Reginald Bacchus in 1899.[13] In 1899-1900 Bacchus published a fictionalised version of her life in Society, a magazine he was editing.[14] The publisher Leonard Smithers then commissioned a pornographic version which was published as The Confessions of Nemesis Hunt (issued in three volumes 1902, 1903, 1906).[14][15][16][17][18][19]
Isa Bowman was the daughter of Charles Andrew Bowman (b. 1851), a music teacher,[20] and Helen Herd, née Holmes.[21] Her sisters, Empsie, Nellie (Mrs Spens) and Maggie (Mrs Tom Morton) Bowman were all actresses,[22][23] and also friends of Carroll.[7] According to Maggie's father-in-law, William Morton, the sisters were all actresses from a very early age. He said that Maggie had an amusing diary in rhyme written by Carroll about her visit to Oxford as a young child.[24]
Isa played a small part in the 1949 British film Vote for Huggett, together with her sisters Empsie and Nellie.[25]