-1864 - 1866- Ophelia is born the second daughter of a slightly eccentric middle-class family on a modest country estate in the Cotswolds. Her father is often away and often brings home strange pets, and one of her earliest memories is of trying to braid a niffler's hair with her older sister, Nicky. Their efforts were not very successful.

-1867 - 1869- Zoe is born in 1867. Ophelia is too young to really care, but her parents seem happy, so she is, too. By the time her next sibling, Octavian, arrives in 1868, however, she's sort of over not being the darling baby of the family anymore and decides almost immediately that she doesn't like her younger brother; a grudge that would waver slightly but never reverse for the entirety of his life.

-1870 - 1872- A darker chapter in Dippet history begins when their mother has a miscarriage in 1870; since it was relatively late-term, the entire family is very aware of the loss and of the pain their mother is going through. Josie takes a long time to recover from the loss, and is only just starting to feel herself again in 1872, when she and Dario begin trying to another child. She has just determined that she is pregnant (hooray!) when an illness hits the family. It seems almost everyone is ill at one point or another--first Octavian, then Nicky, then their mother, then Ophelia, and finally five-year-old Zoe. Everyone recovers after about a week, except for Zoe, who dies.

-1873 - 1874- Mourning for young Zoe does not stop Ophelia's oldest sister, Nicky, from getting her Hogwarts letter and going off to school, nor does it delay the progress of her mother's pregnancy. Because of Josie's illness during the early stages of pregnancy, however, young baby Cora's early life is fraught by health complaints and illnesses. Although she manages, with medical care, to hang on a few extra months and make it into January of 1874, she dies before reaching her first birthday. This is also very hard on Josie, who retreats into herself again. Ophelia has found herself becoming, more and more, her father's daughter, while Octavian manages to break into their mother's inner sanctum of grief to bond more with her. Ophelia also keeps in touch almost daily with her sister Nicky while she's away at school, and can't wait until she gets to attend Hogwarts.

-1875 - 1877- It's finally here! Ophelia arrives to Hogwarts and is sorted into Gryffindor--like her older sister, Nicky, and like her father, as well. She makes friends with girls in her year, but also with her sister's friends; the two are nearly inseparable outside of classes. Because she is frequently hanging around older girls, Ophelia develops a very early interest in the opposite sex, and has a few particularly fervent crushes on sixth- and seventh-year boys while she is still going through introductory classes.

-1878 - 1879- When Ophelia returns for her fourth year, Octavian comes with her, but not for very long. Before they've even reached Christmas break, he has decided he's had enough of Hogwarts and misses home, and since the professors won't listen when he says he wants to quit, he runs away, completely disappearing into the wilderness of the Forbidden Forest. This is the final straw for their poor mother, who gets so depressed that Dario is afraid to leave her home alone. At his wits' end, he commits her to an asylum. Merry fucking Christmas.

Octavian is finally found a few months later in early 1879, while the girls are away in their spring semester. Wandering the wilderness was not a kind lifestyle for the sheltered young lad, and he battles illness and injury for about a month after resurfacing before he dies. Their mother, having heard about all of this via letter and being unable to see her son since his return, is convinced that her presence might have brought him back from the edge of death and, in her grief, commits suicide. Both deaths occur before the girls are home from Hogwarts for the year, which cements things in their father's mind; neither one of them shall be returning to the school the following year. Ophelia is very, very displeased, but their father is immovable.

-1880 - 1881- Ophelia had wondered why Nicky hadn't made any fuss about not being allowed to go back to Hogwarts--her older sister was already seventeen by the time the decision had been made, so even though she had missed her seventh year, there was nothing preventing her from Coming Out the very next day and joining the season! Well, the next season, anyway, once their mother wasn't so recently dead. After a year of private tutoring, their worlds were divided; Ophelia sat and home and hated life, while her sister was swept into a world of endless balls and suitors and things! All of her Hogwarts chums still remembered her, she had the connections, and she ended up making a very good match to a Dutchman, of all people! He had a business out in some colony or other, and it was all very adventurous and exciting. They were married in 1881, and then they were gone, and Ophelia was, except for her father, quite utterly alone.

-1882 - Of course, Ophelia still wrote to Nicky, and was still quite jealous of everything she was experiencing--but no matter how much she wrote to her sister, the news still ended up shocking her entirely: Nicky had run away from her husband! With one of the natives of the colony they were living in! How scandalous!

Her husband wrote to Mr. Dippet to inform him that Nicky had died, and although Ophelia told her father the truth, Dario believed it was for the best that they take the out that Ophelia's former brother-in-law had given them. Nicky having run away, after all, reflected very poorly on Ophelia's reputation, and would likely mean she would make no match at all, and certainly not a good one if she did. Having a dead sister was better than having a rogue sister. After some argument, Ophelia agreed, and Nicky has been "dead" to the public ever since. Although it was hard to do, Ophelia hasn't had any contact with her dear sister since then, either. Unfortunately, the necessity of "mourning" Nicky means that her Coming Out also had to be delayed by a year.

-1883 - 1885- Make that two years; although never particularly close to her aunt (her father's sister), Ophelia had been depending upon her to host her Coming Out, since she was the last living female relation that Ophelia had. In January of 1883, however, as preparations are already underway for her debut, her aunt Gianna's house is trampled by mountain trolls, killing Gianna, her husband, and her two sons. Secretly Ophelia had enjoyed having the slightly less unattractive of her male cousins as a fall-back plan if she couldn't secure any sort of real marriage, so his death hits her particularly hard. Her father has no idea how to even start picking up the pieces of her Coming Out Ball, but promises that he'll find her some sort of suitably well-connected female neighbor to help her into society next year.

Almost as soon as she was out of mourning for her aunt and cousins, tragedy struck her family for the last time. She knew it was the last time, because there was literally no one else who could have died. Well, she could have died, but that wouldn't have been tragic. No one would have cared. After doing something to upset a manticore, in August of 1883, her father was gored to death, leaving her not only in mourning for a year, but also an unexpected orphan. Lacking any close relations, she is instead made the charge of her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Armando Dippet. She hadn't even really been aware that he was still alive; she'd only met him once or twice before she went to live with him. It did not take her long to decide her life was over.

Her only hope, she decided, was to find a husband, and hopefully one that she liked better than Nicky had apparently liked her Dutchman. Since Armando is rich, and old enough to know everyone, she assumes he'll present her as soon as she's officially out of mourning for her father despite it being unseasonably late, only he doesn't. Armando had assumed she was already out (as any young woman of twenty really ought to have been!) and hadn't bothered to plan anything.

Deciding she needed to take matters into her own hands--especially since she'd been away from Hogwarts since fourth year and was therefore, she assumed, going to be entirely unknown to absolutely everyone in society--Ophelia started sniffing around and discovered that a finishing school was opening up in September of 1884. This was her only hope, her last chance, and so she made damn sure that her guardian got her in. For the next year she did the Rose thing, then finally debuted in spring of 1885, at the ripe old age of twenty-one though she immediately started lying about her age and telling everyone she was a year younger.

-1885 - 1887- Ophelia enjoyed life as a debutante much more than she had enjoyed life as a finishing school student. She immediately started making her own decisions about her life, informing her grandfather only afterwards instead of asking his permission on many fronts. One particularly egregious instance of this was when she began secretly writing for Witch Weekly in December of 1886; another was spending a good deal of his money to throw him a 'surprise' birthday party a few months later. This did start to wear on him, and matters came to a head in spring of 1887, when he betrothed her (without speaking to her first) to the current Chief Warlock, Herschel Dawlish. Although a good match on paper, the man was already in his nineties and Ophelia found it hard to be enthusiastic about it. She did try to like him, but when he made physical advances that she wasn't comfortable with, she feigned a faint to escape the interaction and then decided to run away from home.

Conscious of what had happened to her sister, Ophelia was careful to make everyone believe she was only going to stay with friends for extended visits and that her grandfather was amenable to all of this. In fact, it took him a few weeks to even notice she was missing, and by that time she was quite firm in her resolution not to come home until her odious betrothal had been dissolved. She eventually succeeded in conveying enough of the situation to Mr. Roberto Devine - whom she had carried a torch for since the previous fall, when he had rescued her from a koi pond - to impress upon him the urgency of her predicament, and he expressed an interest in courting her. After returning home and convincing Armando, the two began courting and her betrothal was dissolved, the majority of the world being ignorant of its ever having existed in the first place.

The season was a mostly positive one, barring a few casual disasters (most notably, Mr. Devine is almost killed by flying tigers in the Wizarding World Market, but in the end no harm is done). Ophelia enjoyed a growing reputation as a fashion icon and as an excellent high society hostess. Mr. Devine proposed in October of 1887, prior to Ophelia's departure on a holiday she had won in a magazine sweepstakes, and she gleefully said yes.

Nothing good tends to last long in her life, however, and the end of 1887 was marred by trauma. After publishing a very incendiary piece about her brief encounter with Mr. Dawlish in order to sabotage his election chances that year, the man came after her and tried to force her into "apologizing" in a rather worldly sense. Ophelia refused, and in the ensuing struggle ended up putting a sizeable dent in the man's head. Armando agreed to help her cover up the murder, but only on the condition that she go forward with a pious and quiet life - which Ophelia, in hysterics, agreed to.

-1888 - 1890- Ophelia's wedding proceeds without problems and she manages to convince Armando to buy her a team of flying horses and an accompanying carriage so she can arrive in style at the Devine estate. After some speculation about her lack of children for the first year, she does eventually find herself pregnant and gives birth to a boy in February of 1890. Pregnancy did not suit her well and she's quite content to put off a repeat performance, at least for the moment. The household also takes in a foster child when the Stone Statue Children scandal breaks, who remains with them for several months as his natal family is not easily found.