The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman review – the kidnapping of Sally Horner

In March 1948, 11-year-old Sally Horner stole a five-cent notebook from Woolworths in Camden, New Jersey. It was a dare by her school friends and out of character. This minor misdemeanour would change her life for ever. As Sally, described by a teacher as “a perfectly lovely girl”, was leaving the store, a “slender, hawk-faced man” with cold, blue-grey eyes and a scar on his cheek grabbed her by the arm. Claiming to be with the FBI, he said he saw her stealing but would let her go if she agreed to report to him occasionally.

Terrified by this brush with the law, Sally tried to put the experience behind her. But in June, as she was walking home from school, the man reappeared. He told her the government wanted her to go with him to Atlantic City. If she refused she would be sent to the reformatory. Sally believed he was an FBI agent: “she felt his power and feared it, even though it was false”.

The man was known to the police as Frank La Salle. He had just been released from prison for raping five girls aged from 12 to 14. He took Sally on a 21-month odyssey from New Jersey to California, pretending she was his daughter. The abuse only ended when she managed to phone her family from San Jose in March 1950: “Tell Mother I’m OK and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.” La Salle spent the rest of his life in prison. Two years after she escaped, Sally was killed in a car crash. She was 15.

Vladimir Nabokov was butterfly hunting in Wyoming when her death was reported. He noted that Sally had spent “21 months as the cross-country slave” of “a middle-aged morals offender”, phrases that would reappear in his 1955 novel, Lolita, about a man’s obsession with a 12-year-old “nymphet”. Nabokov even referred to Sally by name in the novel. Despite this, he denied that Lolita was inspired by the case. But Sarah Weinman’s exhaustive research reveals many parallels: “What Humbert Humbert did to Dolores Haze is, in fact, what Frank La Salle did to Sally Horner in 1948.”

Weinman is clear: she does not want to diminish the achievement of Lolita but rather “to augment the horror he also captured in the novel”. In this she succeeds well, and her compassionate account reveals the “darkness of real life” behind the novel. She allows Sally, like one of Nabokov’s trapped butterflies, to “emerge from the cage of both fiction and fact, ready to fly free”.