Drink Me

As AcidBurn said, it's based on Cathy from John Steinbeck's East of Eden, but it completely leaves out the significant evil of her character... It focuses more on when she grows old running her brothel and becomes afraid. Along with this, she becomes arthritic and loses the beauty she has had for her entire life. In the novel Cathy does wear poison about her neck, and actually recalls a time when she was a child and drank water pretending it was the "Eat Me" or "Drink Me" (not sure) from Alice and Wonderland, and that it would make her smaller and smaller and she had fantastic adventures. She always leaves a little bit of her Drink Me water left, because her safety net if she ever wanted was that drinking the entire bottle would make her disappear forever. Near the end of the novel when she drinks the poison that she keeps around her neck, this is what she is remembering and she is drinking all of the "Drink Me" to disappear forever.

Given that there are not only other references to Alice in Wonderland, but it is based on a part of East of Eden that specifically has to do with Alice in Wonderland, I'm also quite sure that it is supposed to be "Alice" and not "Ellis".