Harriet the Spy

Harriet the Spy

File:Harriet the Spy.jpg
Author	Louise Fitzhugh
Language	English
Genre	Children's, Spy novel
Publisher	Harper & Row
Publication date	1964
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	298 pp
ISBN	NA

Harriet the Spy is a children's book by Louise Fitzhugh published in 1964. It won the Sequoyah Book Award.

Plot summary

Harriet's life

Harriet M. Welsch is an outgoing 11-year-old girl aspiring to be a spy, who lives on the Upper East Side of New York City. As practice for her future career, she observes others carefully and writes everything she thinks in a notebook. Her nurse, Catherine Golly (known to Harriet as Ole Golly), has encouraged this. It is shown later in the book that Harriet has become so used to writing things down that she cannot think properly without a notebook.

Harriet has an afternoon "spy route" which covers her classmates, friends, and neighborhood. Neighbors whom she observes include Harrison Withers, a bachelor with twenty-six cats; the Robinsons, a very wealthy but boring couple; Mrs. Agatha K. Plumber, an indolent divorcee; the Dei Santis, an Italian immigrant family which runs a grocery store; and the Dei Santis' deliveryman, Little Joe Curry, who has a habit of stealing food from the grocery for snacks and to give to a gang of hungry children who visit him regularly.

Harriet's classmates include rich, popular, class bully and perpetual teacher's pet Marion Hawthorne (described by Harriet in her notebook as a potential "lady Hitler"); Marion's second-in-command, Rachel Hennessey; the repulsive Pinky Whitehead; Laura Peters, who has a habit of smiling at everyone all the time; the somewhat pudgy Carrie Andrews, whose father is the Welsch's doctor; and a new student, the Boy With Purple Socks, who is so dull no one can remember his real name, which is Peter Matthews.

Ole Golly's departure

Ole Golly has a boyfriend named George Waldenstein. Ole Golly invites Mr. Waldenstein over for dinner, and he invites them out for a movie and an egg cream afterwards. Ole Golly is hesitant, but gives in. After the movie, they visit a drug store where Harriet gets an egg cream, and she is not aware of the engagement that was happening between Mr. Waldenstein and Ole Golly. When they get home, they see Mrs. Welsch in a tizzy. The Welsches had returned early to an empty house. Mrs. Welsh attempts to fire Ole Golly, but Golly declares she was about to quit to marry Mr. Waldenstein.

Harriet vs. the Spy Catcher Club

One day during a game of tag, Harriet loses her notebook and is mortified when her friends find it. The children find some of what she wrote hurtful, such as comparing Sport to "a little old woman" for his continual worrying about his father, or "Who does Janie Gibbs think she's kidding? Does she really think she could ever be a scientist?". Janie and Sport join the rest of the class in forming the "Spy Catcher Club", to think up ways to make Harriet's life miserable, including stealing her lunch, passing nasty notes about her in class and having Rachel spill ink all over her and disguise it as an accident. Harriet regularly spies on them through a back fence. One day, out of utter frustration and envy, Harriet drops a note in the Hennesseys' mailbox for Rachel's mother. It states "All those kids hate Rachel. They just want your cake. Furthermore they will clutter up the backyard and also they constitute a nuisance. -A friend". The Hennesseys find it and Rachel later announces to the Spy Catcher Club that a crank note was dropped in her mailbox. She summarizes what the note said, and to Harriet's amusement, Pinky Whitehead states "Well, it's very good cake".

The people on Harriet's spy route fare little better. The bachelor's cats are taken from him and he becomes depressed, the wealthy but boring couple receive a hideous statue which they adore, the indolent woman reacts hysterically to her doctor's announcement that she must be confined to her bed for the rest of her life and the immigrant family's truck is ruined by their lazy son. And to her utter fury and humiliation, Harriet is caught in the dumbwaiter by Mrs. Plumber's maid.

Hurt and lonely, Harriet resolves to get back at her former friends by thinking up a special punishment for each one. She gets into trouble when she carries out some of her plans (including cutting off a chunk of Laura's hair, hiding a frog in Marion's desk and teasing Rachel about her estranged father). When that fails, Harriet tries to resume her friendship with Sport and Janie as if nothing ever happened, but they both reject her. On top of that, Harriet spends all her time in class writing in her notebook as a part of her plan to punish the Spy Catcher Club (in addition to "writing her memoirs"). As a result of never doing her schoolwork, her grades suffer, and Harriet's parents confiscate her notebook and take her to a psychologist. Exactly what the psychologist tells the Welsches is never found out, despite Harriet's assiduous spying; but before long Ole Golly writes to Harriet, telling her that if anyone ever reads her notebook, "you have to do two things, and you don't like either one of them. 1: You have to apologize. 2: You have to lie. Otherwise you are going to lose a friend".

Meanwhile, dissent is rippling through the Spy Catcher Club. Marion and Rachel are calling all the shots, and Sport and Janie eventually get tired of being bossed around by Marion and quit the club, inspiring most of their other classmates to do the same. Eventually all that is left of the club is Marion, Rachel, Carrie, and Laura, playing bridge and Mahjong in the afternoons, a caricature of the stereotypical suburban "ladies' club" of the 1950s. Harriet, spying on them, reflects with brief pity that they will probably do exactly that for the rest of their lives.

Conclusion

Harriet's parents speak with her teacher and the headmistress, and Harriet is appointed editor of the class newspaper (replacing Marion Hawthorne). The newspaper—featuring some stories about the people on Harriet's spy route, as well as juicy stories about her schoolmates' parents (which Harriet has overheard from her own parents)—becomes an instant success. Things improve for those on her spy route as well: Harrison Withers obtains a new kitten, the Robinsons manage to find some people to look at their hideous baby, Mrs. Plumber, having received notice from her doctor that she really did not have to stay in bed, becomes full of bountiful activity, and the Dei Santis' "lazy" son becomes a very studious worker after he obtains a job he likes as a trucker.

After some time as the editor, Harriet makes amends to her former friends through the paper, offering a printed retraction and Janie and Sport forgive her in the end.

Adaptations

It was made into a 1996 film of the same name for Nickelodeon starring Michelle Trachtenberg. In 2010, Disney Channel will remake the 1996 film starring Wizards of Waverly Place cast member Jennifer Stone as Harriet, Degrassi: The Next Generation cast member Melinda Shankar as Harriet's friend, Janie and The Latest Buzz cast member Vanessa Morgan as Harriet's enemy, Marion along with fellow Degrassi: The Next Generation cast member Aislinn Paul as

External links

• "Places" from Harriet the Spy, on Purple Socks, a site about Louise Fitzhugh
• "Harriet the Spy", photographs of locations that inspired the novel