A. Bouazza [ to M.Couturier's "
Yet, someone
did use the word with the sense it has in "Lolita" before Nabokov, Carter, as I
pointed out in my answer to Jansy."]
sends
http://www.tititudorancea.com/z/nymphet.htm .
In this site we read that a "nymphet is seen to be a sexually precocious,
attractive girl, and the term was notably used by French author Pierre de
Ronsard, and popularised by Vladimir Nabokov in the novel
Lolita.... In
Lolita, protagonist Humbert Humbert uses nymphet to describe the
9-14-year-old girls to whom he is attracted. In today's popular press the term
is sometimes applied to women in their late teens or early twenties.The word
Nymphet also appears as the title of a novel by 1920s author J L Carter,
published in the UK by Sampson Low, Marston and Co. In that instance, the term
appears free from any sexual connotations.The archetypal nymphet is the
character Lolita of Vladimir Nabokov's novel...."
JM: A best-selling author must protect his signature,
watermark and copyrights like a tyger, since they're worth a
fortune. On another level, though, Nabokov might have been aiming at being
dictionarized, or at the bliss of placing a label on a freshly
discovered specimen. After all, the foundations of any civilization lies on
well-established names and relics [pity that I hadn't heard of John
Shade the day in which I unearthed a small self-sealing plastic-bag
containing ten brownish nail-parings and the feather from a
waxwing, belabeled: "Relics fromJFS, July 1959" for, in my ignorance,
I threw it away! It must've been worth a fortune...] John Shade's
commentator, in his turn, must have not only subtracted Sybil's rightful
possession of the poem "Pale Fire," but he also plagiarized
Nabokov himself. *
...................................................................................................................................................
* "Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,/I hear
the neighing of my dappled nouns,/soft participles coming down the
steps,/treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns,/and liquid verbs in
ahla and in ili,/Aonian grottoes, nights in the Altai,/black pools of sound with
"I"s for water lilies./ ...My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger./False
shadows turn to track me as I pass/and, wearing beards, disguised as secret
agents,/creep in to blot the freshly written page/and read the blotter in the
looking glass." (Vladimir Nabokov: An Evening of Russian
Poetry)