Dear Jansy,
"So far as I'm aware the Shade-Sybil-Hazel story is a complete VN invention. Can anyone think of anything similar?", asked C. Kunin.
Obviously the "S-S-H story" is a complete VN invention... but so is "Pale Fire" with all its other characters, structure, poem, index inter alia.
So far as I know this is true. But I could be wrong - - I was just asking.
Carolyn, are there direct references to "The Three Faces of Eve", or any kind of hint that might me help understand its placement among putative "PF's literary foreparents"?
Direct references? I'm not sure. The "White twins" could be one.
But the clues that I found were of a different sort. After I had re-read Pale Fire several times, I began to notice that certain words repeated throughout the text (examples: green/red, lilac or lavendar, seashells, puddle, ditch, stroke, bat, "the babe" for example). I assumed that these were clues that Nabokov had planted.
Following the tv clue as I posited it, I re-read the story of Jekyll & Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Three Faces of Eve. In "Eve" the first chapter tells of the initial trauma/s that seemed to trigger the appearance of alternate personalities and the word ditch appears over and over (the child witnesses two terribly mutilitated bodies being retrieved from an irrigation ditch that she has been forbidden to go near). I'm sure it doesn't sound like much, but I can tell you that the experience of reading that first chapter with the repetition of ditch, ditch, ditch was quite extraordinary.
Carolyn