Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak Read Free Book Online Page B

recalled her father’s private aerie as “a sunshiny room, book-lined, attractive and warm,” and it had the lure of the forbidden for the children, who were not allowed in very often. Far above the street, wearing a three-piece suit even for writing at home, Edward would put in two chapters’ worth of work on his typewriter in the morning, come down for lunch with his family, and return for a third chapter in the afternoon. As if to repay them for their indulgence of his mental process—for he was a generous father, if a strict one—Edward never worked in the evenings or on weekends and took his family on long summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Martha’s Vineyard, or other pleasant locales.
    When she was not on such a leisure trip, Harriet attended the prestigious public Barringer High School. She had long passed the age at which she could climb trees, and social activities around the turn of the century were restricted mostly to groups. Dating was unheard of unless a boy had serious intentions—and even then he had to work up to seeing his girl unchaperoned—so, like most girls of her social standing, the structure of Harriet’s teenage life was built upon school, family, and church. Adolescence was just starting to emerge as a period of life that was set off from what came before and what came after, and as high school enrollment increased dramatically in the early years of the century, school became the organizing principle behind adolescence in a way it had never been before. Teenage girls were not yet in thrall to fashion, consumerism, or pop culture of the kind that would become synonymous with the very idea of adolescence by the twenties, and so Harriet led a fairly quiet life. Thanks to her family’s money, she, unlike the majority of teenagers at that time, did not have to work after school either at home or outside of it. Instead, she spent her spare hours with her family and friends and concentrated on her schoolwork.
    She did not always study as hard as she could have, though. A pop quiz about Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake” near the end of her secondary schooling ended in an episode similar to her elementary school gaffe about the donkey. The story, which opens with a famous scene of a stag hunt in a forest and evolves into an epic tale of love and clan rivalry, intertwines James Douglas, the outlawed uncle of the royal family, his daughter Ellen, and several other characters, two of whom are suitors to Ellen. Amazingly enough, considering her father’s line of work and her own interest in books, Harriet had never been taught what a heroine was. The books of her childhood tended to feature rather weak, weepy little girls whose main function was to overcome adversity with good Christian values. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, star of the eponymous book published in 1903, when Harriet was eleven, joined earlier counterparts like the melodramatic Elsie Dinsmore, a deeply pious poor little rich girl who longs for love from her father and has to contend with a mean schoolteacher. True heroines were few and far between, and girls were barely aware that there was any alternative. Even the ones who sought adventure by turning to boys’ books did not venture very far. As one reading study noted, “The exciting stories mentioned by the girls are very quiet compared to those mentioned by the boys.” Harriet had few examples, and her father, for one, was certainly not in the habit of encouraging his daughter to be an adventuress, lest it should spoil her for what he considered to be the true calling of all women. “He thought I should stay home and keep house,” she remembered later. As a result, she believed that the hero was the most important character in the story, and the heroine the second most important. When asked to fill in the pop quiz blanks for who occupied each of these roles in “The Lady of the Lake,” she