MILDRED WRIT BENSON: Nancy Drew, the girl detective whose love of adventure and hatred of housework captured the imagination of millions of girls for almost half-a-century from 1930 onwards, was always far better known than her main creator, Mildred Wirt Benson, who died on May 28th aged 96.
The reason for her obscurity was that she wrote the Nancy Drew series for the Stratemeyer Syndicate in New York under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, the author's real identity being kept secret until it was revealed in a court case in the 1980s.
Mildred Benson, known as Millie - she had been contributing a weekly column, On The Go With Millie, to the Toledo Blade newspaper in Iowa until January of this year - wrote her first Nancy Drew story in response to a request from Edward Stratemeyer to ghost-write a mystery novel for young girls. She accepted the brief - and the fee of $125 with no royalty - and wrote not just one but 23 Nancy Drew titles, published between 1930 and 1953.
Once the secret was revealed, Mildred Benson talked freely about Nancy Drew and what she had been trying to achieve with her character within the fairly narrow confines of the story. "The plots provided me were brief, yet certain hackneyed situations could not be bypassed. So I concentrated upon Nancy, trying to make her a departure from the stereotyped heroine commonly encountered in series books of the day," she wrote.
It was her deliberate intention to make Nancy ahead of her time, because she felt that girls were ready for a change in what they read about, and that they would welcome someone to whom they could aspire. She believed that Nancy's popularity rested on the fact that she fulfilled every girl's dream of being resourceful, physically undaunted and smarter than many of the adults with whom she had to deal. The additional hatred of housework was a deliberate break with tradition and one which was designed to touch a chord with modern readers. She once said that she wanted girls to learn that "women are entitled to their freedom, but they shouldn't use it as an excuse for license".
In the 1970s, when Nancy was cited as a pioneer of the women's liberation movement, Mildred Benson preferred to say that she was an individual and that she would have believed in "the family".
Translated the world over (at the last count they were available in 17 languages and had amassed sales of over 30 million copies) the remarkable thing about the Nancy Drew stories was that they continued to appear fresh to successive generations long after the things that Mildred Benson had introduced as modern had become commonplace.
The youngest of two children, she was born on July 5th, 1905, in Ladora, Iowa. She always wanted to be a writer and sold her first story to St Nicholas magazine when she was 12, before going on to study journalism at the University of Iowa, completing her degree in 1927 and adding a master's (the first in journalism from the university) a couple of years later.
Though she had written three books in the Ruth Fielding series for young girls, it was the Nancy Drew books that launched her into writing for children, and she went on to produce 130 books altogether.
Mildred Wirt Benson: born 1905; died, May 2002