Female Character of the Week: Harriet M. Welsch

There are many female characters I love in books, movies, and TV.  Every once in awhile, I have to pay homage to my favorite female characters from the under-18 set.  Little girls and teenage girls get a bad rap.  It’s about time they got some respect, and few of them earn the title of Female Character of the Week better than Harriet M. Welsch from Harriet the Spy. (Please not that the link goes to the book cover and NOT to a clip from the movie adaptation I like to pretend doesn’t exist starring Buffy’s annoying FAKE little sister).

Name: Harriet M. Welsch

Why She Rocks: Harriet M. Welsch is an eleven-year-old paparazzo-in-training living on the Upper East Side in the 1960s.  She’s somewhat spoiled, treats her family’s cook badly, has loving but somewhat absent parents, and a nanny named Ole Golly who she looks up to more than anyone else.  She spends her time following people around and writing about them.  She constantly compares herself to Mata Hari.  Her best friends are a boy named Sport who takes care of his father, and her chemistry-loving friend Janie.

Harriet gets into a lot of trouble when her classmates find her Spy Notebook and read through the whole thing.  She becomes ostracized from and teased by the rest of the kids, including Sport and Janie, and she copes with the news in several different ways: she stays home from school, she stops doing her classwork and writes in her notebook all day, she dreams up elaborate revenge scenarios against the people who have done her wrong.  Eventually, she becomes editor of the Sixth Grade Page in her school newspaper, prints a retraction about the people she wronged, while still hinting at the nastiness spread by the ringleaders of the Spy Catchers’ Club.

I love Harriet not only because she is wonderfully flawed, but because she has taught me two very important things:

1) Always ask questions.  I forgot exactly what the conversation was in reference to, but Sport expressed disbelief that Harriet didn’t know something, and Harriet thought, “So what?  I can always learn.”  To this day, if I ever feel embarrassed to ask a question or admit that I don’t know something that I should, I think of Harriet’s philosophy.  “So what?  I can always learn.”  There’s always something new to learn.

2) Write like your life depends on it.  I kept a spy notebook of my own when I was in third grade, shortly after I read the book for the first time.  Instead of a composition notebook, I wrote in a blue college exam notebook – my father, being a college professor, had plenty of those in the house.  One day, my eighth grade teacher saw me writing in it, took it away from me, and read the whole thing at her desk. NOT out loud, THANK GOD, but read silently at her desk the entire time.  When her eyebrows raised, I knew she had reached the part where I wrote about her, and I’m pretty sure I literally died in my seat right then and there, and everything I’m typing now, I’m typing post-mortem.

I got into a mild amount of trouble for that incident – clearly, not enough trouble to stop me from writing.  In fact, getting caught was a little exhilarating.  Someone was reading my work, and she was clearly intrigued enough to read through the whole thing.  I knew how to keep a reader’s attention.

There are many female characters (and male characters, of course) that have fueled my love for reading, but I must credit Harriet M. Welsch (and her creator, Louise Fitzhugh) for giving me the writing bug – the best disease ever for which there is no cure.