Under the Influence: Nancy Drew

I have previously mentioned two of the strongest influences in my life that gave me a strong assumption of the essential strength and equality of female characters to male – specifically, the Oz series (in which the most prominent characters are almost always girls/women), and the Little House books told from the point of view of Laura Ingalls (later Laura Ingalls Wilder). But there was a third such influence: Nancy Drew.

Dating all the way back to 1930, Nancy Drew in all her incarnations has been a young amateur sleuth, child of a successful lawyer (Carson Drew) and whose mother died at a young age. She has two friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, who often help her in her investigations. Bess is highly feminine and often shows fear; George (a girl, despite the name) is a tomboy and more prone to confrontation. Nancy sits between them, neither as aggressive as George nor stereotypically feminine as Bess, and both smarter and more capable overall than either.

I first encountered Nancy Drew in a bookstore – I think I'd been brought there by my father – at around the age of 9 or 10. I saw there was this series of books with bright yellow covers, found the one with the #1, and bought The Secret of the Old Clock.

I immediately took to Nancy. Here was a girl who would risk herself to help other people, and did it with panache and kindness. I began to accumulate the other volumes of the series, until I reached a total of 50 or more – all that were available at the time.

Throughout all of these volumes, I continued to be impressed by Nancy's constant devotion to the truth. The Titian-haired teenager (to use one of the common descriptions of Nancy, which introduced me to the word "Titian") takes a positive joy in finding an apparently intractable mystery – a haunting, disappearing valuables, an inexplicable interest by strangers in some trivial object – and tracing the clues to a complete explanation, even risking her life and limb in the process – for the various kidnappers, thieves, and blackmailers she confronts will often stop at little to prevent her from tampering with their plans.

When I found the old version of The Hidden Staircase, I was in for something of a shock. Not only was the setting rather different (after all, it was the 1930s versus the late 1950s-60s!) but also the book was drastically changed. I had previously had no idea that there were different versions – but there were. In a way, I found that to be a wonderful thing – it meant that there were more adventures of Nancy to read which would let me see how things changed through the years – but it was also annoying in that it meant someone had decided the early ones weren't good enough for some reason.

It wasn't until I was older that I understood the point of some of the changes; for example, the earlier versions had a sixteen-year-old Nancy, while Nancy in the later versions is eighteen. Those two years are, of course, crucial in that they change Nancy from legally a minor to legally a young adult. This gives her more agency in a legal sense, although to me it also weakens to a slight degree her personal agency.

Other changes included reducing Nancy's tendency to act in ways that were questionably legal; for instance, in the original of The Secret of the Old Clock Nancy explicitly hides evidence from the police, something that a lawyer's daughter would be expected to realize is a huge no-no. There were also more obvious elements of classism and racism in various books which the later rewrites attempted to change. In addition, they attempted to reduce Nancy's more… direct nature to one with a bit more perceived femininity (although even the "nicer" Nancy was more than capable of diving headlong into a case, risking her life, and confronting bad guys directly if she had to).

I stopped collecting Nancy Drews sometime in the late 1970s or very early 80s, and thought that the series had ended there. Instead, I discovered many years later that the series continued for years afterward, and as a bookseller at Borders was surprised to see new Nancy Drew books of more than one series.

Despite the age of the protagonist, there was very little sexual content – not surprising, given that the series was targeted at relatively young people and started back in the 1930s, but somewhat puzzling as a reader became older. (Some of the later series became positively racy, though; I have heard that Nancy even kissed a boy who wasn't Ned Nickerson!)

Still, the series remains popular, and that's because Nancy and her friends – despite the old-style cultural values and outdated assumptions – still represent the ideals of self-confident, independent young women who are competent, courageous, and kind. All the mystery series for young people owe a huge debt to Nancy (and her distaff counterparts from Stratemeyer, the Hardy Boys); I do not think there would be many of the "young amateur detective" series around without them. It only occurred to me when writing this review, but the Persona series appeals to me, to a great extent, because despite all the supernatural weirdness it still feels to me like a very strong spiritual descendant of Nancy Drew, with its collection of teenage investigators drawn together to seek out the answers to questions most of the adults around them don't even see.

And for me, personally, Nancy remains exactly that strong a symbol of what a woman can be – as competent as any man (she runs, cooks, shoots, picks locks, competitively rows, does archeology, and more!), just as brave as any of her male counterparts, and able to be as stylish and dashing as James Bond. My collection, alas, is gone with the floods in my basement, but I still remember her with great fondness. Perhaps I will pick up one or two and see if they hold up after these years; I have, after all, two daughters who could use such positive role models!