Alice Pagett’s prolonged deafness

Alice Pagett’s prolonged deafness is a defining childhood condition whose unexplained onset and equally inexplicable remission become part of the mystery surrounding her later speech. She was severely disabled from the age of four and remained profoundly deaf for most of her early life; seven years later, the impairment lifted, though her doctors had found no satisfactory explanation for it.

Onset and Duration

The account places the beginning of Alice Pagett’s disability at age four. It persisted through the greater part of her childhood, making her, in the later discussion of her speech, a child who had been profoundly deaf for most of her years. The narrative thus establishes not a brief illness but a prolonged condition that shaped what she could have heard and learned.

Unexplained Recovery

Seven years after the disability began, Alice Pagett was inexplicably released from it. Her doctors had been unable to explain the infirmity satisfactorily, and its end was no more medically clarified than its onset. The account presents the change as a recovery, but leaves its cause unresolved.

Significance to the Later Mystery

Alice Pagett’s history of deafness becomes especially striking when she speaks in an unfamiliar language. Gerry Fenn points to the apparent contradiction: a child deaf for most of her life would not know a language she had never heard or probably read. Monsignor Delgard likewise considers her unexplained disability and recovery alongside her later speech in old English. The condition therefore carries two linked meanings in the story: it is a substantial childhood impairment in its own right, and an unresolved part of the evidence that unsettles ordinary explanations of Alice Pagett’s experiences.