The inference has been left by some that Opal has made use of clever intrigue, but it is scarcely reasonable to believe that mere cleverness could take her so completely out of a more or less commonplace environment into the distant environment of her particular fancy. Opal's dream has materialized.

Reverend W. A. Elkins 1930




The story of Opal Whitleley, from poor logger's daughter to best-selling American diarist and possible hoaxer, is one of the most fascinating literary mysteries of the 20th century.

The diary of her childhood in the Oregon forests - begun when she was six, written in a strange phonetic language, torn up by a jealous sister and pieced together from a million fragments - won rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic when it was published in the Twenties.



'Opal Whiteley. The Journal of an Understanding Heart'


'The reader who fails to respond to its appeal has surely lost the secret of his own childhood'
The Daily Telegraph

'A book full of beauty and equally full of meaning'

The Observer

'The most entrancing book ever printed'

The Morning Post


But rumours began to circulate that the diary was a fraud, that its content could not have been written by a girl from the backwoods of Oregon. Opal's subsequent claims to have been descended from the French royal family and to have been crowned a Hindu princess on a trip to India were greeted with derision, and the book was removed from the bookshelves and she quietly faded from the public eye.

In 1948, health visitors found her starving in a squalid basement bed-sitting room off Haverstock Hill, London, her only possessions, fifteen thousand books stacked from ceiling to floor, all of them about the French royal family.

Opal Whiteley Opal was judged unfit to take care of herself and admitted to an asylum on the outskirts of London, near St Albans, where staff and patients alike knew her as FranÆoise Marie Bourbon D'Orl¹an - or Princess for short. She lived there, forgotten, for forty-four years. On her death in 1992 at the age of 95, she was buried at Highgate under her assumed name.



Was Opal's story true? Was she the daughter of a French prince as she claimed, of did she dream up the whole affair. Was the diary a hoax or merely the ramblings of a disturbed mind?




The enigma is solved in Episode 1 of Series II of The Sexton's Tales.

'THE FAIRY PRINCESS'.