nymphet

But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.

Her fortunes changed in 1963 when she found an image of a nymphet by Balthus to accompany a review of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita.”

“This valley girl slash intellectual slash little nymphet, it was like: Oh, my God, this girl is going to steal this episode.”

She even saw a bit of her innocent self in Nabokov’s nymphet: “She was teetering on the brink of womanhood, like me. … She wants her own way, she’s moody, she wants to be treated like a grown-up, but behaves like a child. I got all that.”

Professor Humbert Humbert marries a widow to be near her nymphet daughter.