Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (review)

Everyone knows who created Nancy Drew—Carolyn Keene, of course. But for many years the true identity of Carolyn Keene was carefully guarded by the members of Edward Stratemeyer's family and a handful of authors under contract to keep silent. In Girl Sleuth, Melanie Rehak traces the stories of four of the people who created and popularized Nancy Drew: Edward Stratemeyer, his daughters Harriet and Edna, and Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson. As Nancy might, Rehak follows a trail of clues—in the form of quotations from letters, interviews, business agreements, and other published documents—to calculate the influence that these people, their culture and their times had on America's favorite girl sleuth.

Rehak begins, as one must, with the entrepreneur Edward Stratemeyer, an author with a prolific pen, a keen sense of what American children wanted to read, and the business acumen to launch his own company. His Stratemeyer Syndicate employed ghostwriters to produce books for several series popular with American children in the middle of the twentieth century, series like The Rover Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Ruth Fielding, and, of course, the Hardy Boys. With the phenomenal success of the first three Hardy Boys volumes, Edward Stratemeyer set one of his most talented ghost writers, Mildred Augustine Wirt, to work on new a series featuring a single mystery-solving heroine. She was born Mildred Augustine in Iowa, and during her years with Stratemeyer, she was married to Asa Wirt. Following his death, she married a newspaper editor, George Benson. As he did for all his ghostwriters, Stratemeyer drafted detailed plot notes and character descriptions. Benson followed, enlarged upon, and altered Stratemeyer's outlines to breathe life into Nancy Drew and to set her to solving the mysteries in the first three volumes of the Nancy Drew series, volumes that, like the Hardy Boys books, proved immediately successful.

But Edward Stratemeyer would not live to enjoy Nancy Drew's success; weakened by pneumonia, Stratemeyer died twelve days after the series first appeared on bookshelves. Since financial realities of the Depression made it impossible to sell the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Edward's two daughters, Harriet and Edna, defied social convention and took it upon themselves to run the company. Over the years, Harriet became the dominant figure at the company, although Edna continued to influence company decisions (often to her sister's frustration) until she died. Initially Edna drafted the plot outlines for Nancy Drew for Benson to develop, but Harriet took over this work in 1942, and Rehak claims that it is these two inimitable women, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, who most profoundly shaped the character of Nancy Drew.

Raised in affluence and educated at Wellesley, Harriet was well-versed in the both the domestic and social skills expected of well-to-do women of her day. Among her fellow Wellesley students, Harriet stood out as a woman especially capable of fulfilling the Wellesley motto: "Not to be ministered unto but to minister to." Like Harriet, Nancy Drew proved especially capable of seeing a problem and taking charge to solve it; like Harriet and other Wellesley women of the time, Nancy Drew managed to do so with perfect manners and in fashionable attire.

Like Harriet, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson was born into a socially prominent, well-to-do family that valued the fine arts, perhaps especially so for the culture they brought to the Augustine's rural community of Ladora, Iowa. Despite her parents' efforts to refine her, Mildred preferred life outdoors: ice skating, playing baseball, and swimming with the boys. When indoors, Mildred read everything she could find, borrowing books from the public library when she could and from neighbor boys when she couldn't. She always yearned to be a writer, and sold a short story to St. Nicholas magazine when she was only fourteen. At the University of Iowa, Mildred was a stand-out athlete in basketball, soccer, and swimming. She played xylophone with the school orchestra...