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- In January 1955, Parker signed a new fiction contract with The New Yorker and returned to its pages with a story called “I Live on Your Visits.” It too was in familiar aged-Volney-ladies territory. Her next, however, was not.
Parker told an interviewer around this time that she usually got the names for her characters from the “telephone book and from the obituary columns.” It is highly unlikely that “Lolita” came from either of those sources. In Parker’s story, Lolita is perhaps 18 or 19 when we meet her, and, unlike Nabokov’s Lo, she isn’t very pretty. But Mrs. Ewing, Lolita’s widowed mother, is—like her counterpart—all about “vivacity,” “sparkling,” and “little spirals of laughter,” not to mention husband-hunting. When John Marble, a dashing man in his thirties and looking “as if he had just alighted from the chariot of the sun,” comes to their town, the hearts of all eligible girls and women are set ablaze, including, we gather, Mrs. Ewing’s. To her mother’s distress, Marble chooses Lolita.