Lolita is divided into two parts and 69 chapters.[1] It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 to a Swiss father and an English mother in Paris, who is obsessed with young girls, whom he refers to as “nymphets”. Humbert suggests that this obsession results from the death of a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh (a deliberate play by Nabokov on the poem “Annabel Lee”, by Humbert’s favorite poet Edgar Allan Poe, which also involves a dead girl and her left behind lover). After an unsuccessful marriage to a Polish doctor’s adult daughter, Valeria, Humbert moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, in 1947 to write. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, a widow. While Charlotte tours him around the house, he meets her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo and L), with whom—partially due to her uncanny resemblance to Annabel—he immediately becomes infatuated. Humbert stays at the house only to remain near her. While he is obsessed with Lolita, he disdains her crassness and preoccupation with contemporary American popular culture, such as teen movies and comic books.
While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert agrees to marry Charlotte in order to continue living near Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious to Humbert’s distaste for her, as well as his lust for Lolita, until she reads his diary. Upon learning of Humbert’s true feelings and intentions, Charlotte plans to flee with Lolita and threatens to expose Humbert as a “detestable, abominable, criminal fraud.” Fate intervenes on Humbert’s behalf, however; as she runs across the street in a state of shock, Charlotte is struck and killed by a passing car.
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