Annabel's death

Annabel Leigh, the twelve-year-old daughter of old friends of Humbert Humbert's aunt, was the first and, in many ways, the defining object of his erotic obsession. She was a lovely child a few months his junior, of mixed English and Dutch parentage, with honey-colored skin, thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, and a big bright mouth. During the summer of 1919, on the Riviera near his father's Hotel Mirana, Humbert and Annabel fell madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other. Their passion was hopeless because they were never allowed the privacy to consummate it; the only intimacy they could snatch was on the crowded beach, where they would sprawl in a petrified paroxysm of desire, their hands creeping toward each other through the sand, their incomplete contacts driving them to a state of exasperation that even the cold blue water could not relieve.

The Two Attempts to Thwart Fate

Their first tryst took place one night in a mimosa grove at the back of the Leighs' villa. There, on the ruins of a low stone wall, Humbert kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear, and she trembled and twitched as his hand located what it sought. A dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over her childish features. The scent of her toilet powder mingled with her own biscuity odor, and his senses were suddenly filled to the brim. But a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing, and her mother's voice called her back to the house. The second and final attempt occurred on the last day of that fatal summer. Under the flimsiest of pretexts, they escaped from a sidewalk café to the beach and found a desolate stretch of sand. In the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, they had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sunglasses for the only witness. Humbert was on his knees, on the point of possessing his darling, when two bearded bathers came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement. The interruption was final: four months later, Annabel died of typhus in Corfu.

The Consolidation of Frustration

The shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, making it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of Humbert's youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in them with a perfection that he insists must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact youngsters of today. Long after her death, he felt her thoughts floating through his; long before they met, they had had the same dreams. He found strange affinities between them: the same June of the same year, a stray canary had fluttered into her house and his, in two widely separated countries. The mimosa grove, the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with him, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted him ever since.

The Fatal Consequence

Humbert is convinced that in a certain magic and fateful way, Lolita began with Annabel. He asks himself whether the rift in his life began in the glitter of that remote summer, or whether his excessive desire for that child was only the first evidence of an inherent singularity. He surrenders to a retrospective imagination that feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives, causing each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end. But he is certain that there might have been no Lolita at all had he not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child in a princedom by the sea. Twenty-four years later, he broke Annabel's spell by incarnating her in another. The memory of Annabel also directly precipitates his breakdowns: a dreadful breakdown sent him to a sanatorium for more than a year, and soon after his return to civilization he had another bout with insanity. He owes his complete restoration to a discovery he made while being treated at that particular very expensive sanatorium: the sport of trifling with psychiatrists, cunningly leading them on, never letting them see that he knows all the tricks of the trade. The memory of Annabel, and the frustration of her loss, is the wound that drives the entire narrative.