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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Revisiting Harriet the Spy Nearly a Half Century Later
Book One
I recently began rereading Harriet the Spy because I wondered if my nearly fifty-nine-year-old self would be as in love with the book as my nine-year-old self had been.
The first time I read Harriet the Spy, I was in the fourth grade. Originally published in 1964, by the time I read it five years later, it was out in paperback. I had come across it at a book store that was conveniently located next to a Baskin Robbins where my parents and I often went for a Saturday night ice cream cone and book browsing.
Part of what I loved about Harriet the Spy was that Harriet was an only child.
I was also an only child and in 1969, being an only child was not at all fashionable. Outside of a single half-cousin, I did not even know another only child. People did, however, often tell me I must be spoiled because I had my own room, and there was an assumption that I did not know how to “share.”
The other part of what I loved about Harriet was that she had a spy route. Like Harriet, I tended to be nosy. This was due in no small part to the fact that as an only children of that era, I often found myself surrounded by adults, and in that time the line between the world of the adult and the world of the child was much more sharply delineated. I often did not have other children with whom to play, so observing the lives of the adults around me was the most readily available entertainment.
Book One
The structure of the story of Harriet the Spy was something that went almost unnoticed by my nine-year-old self.
I say almost because at the time I had noticed that the story was composed of two books. It was only my second year of reading chapter books, and I was quite impressed that I was reading a tome about a girl spy that was so overflowing with intrigue that it needed two books to contain the story being told.
Nearly fifty years and a Master of Fine Arts in writing fiction later, I can see that Louise Fitzhugh broke Harriet the Spy into two books because it’s really two intimately entwined stories. The first, being the last few weeks of Harriet’s life with her nanny, Ole…
