Humbert Humbert and Annabel Leigh

Humbert Humbert's relationship with Annabel Leigh is the foundational trauma of his life, a pre-adolescent summer romance whose abrupt termination by death creates the permanent psychological template for his later obsession with Dolores Haze. The affair establishes the pattern of thwarted desire, the fusion of spiritual and physical love, and the specific physical type—the nymphet—that Humbert will spend the rest of his life pursuing and attempting to recapture.

Identity and Background

Annabel Leigh was, like Humbert, of mixed parentage—half-English, half-Dutch—and a few months his junior. Her parents, bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness), were old friends of Humbert's aunt Sybil and had rented a villa not far from the Hotel Mirana on the Riviera. Humbert remembers her features far less distinctly today than he did a few years ago, before he knew Lolita; he distinguishes two kinds of visual memory: one in which he can skillfully recreate an image with his eyes open, seeing Annabel in such general terms as "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," and "big bright mouth," and another in which he instantly evokes, with shut eyes, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face—and this is how he sees Lolita. Annabel wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; Humbert wanted to be a famous spy. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused them the same intense pain.

The Summer Romance

All at once they were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other—hopelessly, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by their actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh, but they were unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt they made to meet at night in her garden, the only privacy they were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the beach. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from their elders, they would sprawl all morning in a petrified paroxysm of desire, taking advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward him, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted them sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips. These incomplete contacts drove their healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which they still clawed at each other, could bring relief.

The Unsuccessful First Tryst

One night, Annabel managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa they found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees they could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to Humbert now like playing cards—presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as he kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above them, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. He saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when his hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than he, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss him, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed his wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to his face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against his; then his darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let him feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, his heart, his throat, his entrails, he gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of his passion. He recalls the scent of some kind of toilet powder—he believes she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid—a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume that mingled with her own biscuity odor. A sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented their senses from overflowing, and as they drew away from each other, there came from the house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note, and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that 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 Final Attempt and Annabel's Death

Under the flimsiest of pretexts—this was their very last chance, and nothing really mattered—they escaped from a sidewalk cafe to the beach and found a desolate stretch of sand. There, 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 only witness. Humbert was on his knees, and on the point of possessing his darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement. Four months later, Annabel died of typhus in Corfu. The shock of her death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, making of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of his youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in them with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death Humbert felt her thoughts floating through his; long before they met they had had the same dreams; they found strange affinities—the same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and his, in two widely separated countries.

Thematic Significance

Humbert is convinced that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. He asks himself whether it was in the glitter of that remote summer that the rift in his life began, or whether his excessive desire for that child was only the first evidence of an inherent singularity. When he was a child and she was a child, his little Annabel was no nymphet to him; he was her equal, a faunlet in his own right, on that same enchanted island of time. But today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, he thinks he can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in his life. They loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. He was a strong lad and survived, but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open. Twenty-four years later, he broke her spell by incarnating her in another. The seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied what the seraphs saw—a tangle of thorns that Humbert presents as exhibit number one to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.