I believe she remained a seven-year-old little girl for Dahl as well-at least in the imaginative world of The BFG where she is recast as the hero Sophie. But because she died as a seven-year-old little girl, she remained a seven-year-old little girl to me, the reader, who saw her spirit under every page. Had Olivia Twenty Dahl not died from measles encephalitis at only seven, had she continued to live to be alive now, she would be approaching her sixtieth birthday. However, when I started reading the book with my daughter, the dedication howled out to me, thoroughly coloring the lens through which I read. The slim sad range of those dates would have meant nothing to me, eager as I was to dig into a book about child-eating giants, secure in my own childish immortality. If I had noticed the dedication when I first read The BFG as a child, I certainly didn’t think about it then. Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s classic The BFG begins with a dedication to the author’s daughter: “For Olivia: 20th April 1955 - 17th November 1962.”
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