37 pages • 1 hour read
Louise FitzhughHarriet the Spy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Harriet Welsch is an 11-year-old girl who lives in a brownstone on East 87th Street in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Her best friend is a boy named Sport who aspires to be a ballplayer. Harriet explains her hobby of spying on people to Sport. She has a regular route around the neighborhood to watch various occupants and records her observations in a journal. She began keeping notebooks when she was eight years old.
While Sport and Harriet are outside playing a game called Town that Harriet invented, they are interrupted by her nanny, Ole Golly. The woman announces that she is taking the children on a day trip because it’s important to see as much of the world as one can. The trio takes public transportation to Far Rockaway. Ole Golly leads them to a tiny house inhabited by a woman who “stood like a mountain, her hands on her hips, in a flowered cotton print dress and enormous hanging coat sweater. Probably the biggest sweater in the world, thought Harriet” (14).
This is Ole Golly’s mother. Mrs. Golly is delighted to see her daughter and the two children. Harriet observes that the woman isn’t terribly bright. Ole Golly says that she brought the children to observe someone who has lived her whole life in a tiny house with no curiosity at all about the world.
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary
That night, Harriet ponders what she saw in the tiny house. She goes into Ole Golly’s room to announce her conclusion: “I want to know everything, everything, […] Everything in the world, everything, everything. I will be a spy and know everything’” (24). Ole Golly replies that knowing everything is useless if a person doesn’t use that information in some way.
The following morning is the first day of the new school year. Harriet and Sport are now in the sixth grade at the Gregory School, which is two blocks from their homes. When they arrive, they are greeted by classmates from the previous year, including Harriet’s other best friend, Janie Gibbs, who “had a chemistry set and planned one day to blow up the world” (28).
As the rest of the students arrive for the first day, Harriet makes notes in her journal about how annoying, boring, and pathetic most of them are. She perks up at lunchtime to enjoy her usual meal of a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich. At the end of the school day, Harriet goes home for a milk-and-cake snack that the family cook provides and then dons her spy clothes: a belt to hold a flashlight, pens, a water canteen, a pouch for her notebook, and a Boy Scout knife. She never uses most of these items but thinks they might come in handy someday.
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Harriet follows a routine spy route, but today she is trying something new. She wants to eavesdrop on a woman named Mrs. Plumber who lives in a private house rather than an apartment building. These are harder to enter, but Harriet finds a way to crawl into a dumbwaiter and raise herself to Mrs. Plumber’s bedroom. Peeking through a crack in the dumbwaiter door, Harriet sees that the woman doesn’t get out of bed but talks on the telephone about the grand career she is planning for herself. Harriet notes in her journal: “IT’S JUST WHAT OLE GOLLY SAYS. RICH PEOPLE ARE BORING. SHE SAYS WHEN PEOPLE DON’T DO ANYTHING THEY DON’T THINK ANYTHING” (45).
After leaving Mrs. Plumber’s, Harriet stops at a nearby luncheonette for an egg cream. She likes to play a game of eavesdropping on conversations while her back is turned. She can usually figure out people’s appearance simply based on their conversations. When she gets ready to leave the luncheonette, she realizes that she is right about all three people she overheard.
Afterward, she goes to see Sport. The boy manages the household chores of cooking and cleaning for his father, who is a writer but not very practical. Sport proudly shows Harriet his ledger books for recording his family’s finances. If Sport didn’t take care of the money, his father would have nothing. He says that if he isn’t any good as a ballplayer, then he wants to become a CPA one day.
Next on her spy route, Harriet goes to the Dei Santis’ grocery store. A window off the alley allows her to spy on the entire family in the back room. The parents are upset because one of their sons, Fabio, doesn’t help and wants to borrow the car all the time. Harriet isn’t impressed with his older brother, who looks like a dumb bear, and his sister, who is interested only in her appearance. After recording her observations about the family, Harriet sneaks around the side to watch their delivery boy, Little Joe Curry. He is always eating, and Harriet sees him slipping a large quantity of food to four skinny, hungry children.
That night, as Harriet is soaking in her tub, attended by Ole Golly, she hears her father returning home. He seems upset about something that happened at work, but Harriet can’t catch most of her parents’ conversation because Ole Golly is talking to her. Apparently, Ole Golly has a boyfriend. The notion piques Harriet’s interest. After she is sent off to bed, Harriet thinks about another person on her route, Harrison Withers, who makes birdcages and lives with many cats.
Book 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
While reading Harriet the Spy, it is important to remember that the novel is set near its 1964 publication date. This is not a work of historical fiction but one that represents the author’s world, as well as Harriet’s. In that era, the career options available to girls and women were limited. This makes Harriet’s and Janie’s pursuits even more uncommon. Their upper-class families expect them to become proper young ladies, which neither one wants to be.
The novel is partitioned into three books. The purpose of this division won’t be apparent until the end of the story but Book 1 consists of Harriet’s happy life under the watchful eye of Ole Golly. In Book 2, Ole Golly accepts a marriage proposal and moves away, leaving Harriet to deal with life on her own. Book 3 brings Ole Golly back into Harriet’s world briefly via a letter that offers wise guidance to help Harriet solve a problem that her spying caused.
The first three chapters of Book 1 primarily describe Harriet, her family, her friends, and the Upper East Side neighborhood where she lives. The theme of Observation Versus Understanding is introduced almost immediately both through a depiction of Harriet’s spy activities and in Ole Golly’s excursion to visit her own apathetic mother. Meeting Mrs. Golly Senior convinces Harriet that knowing everything is important. However, Ole Golly foreshadows Harriet’s future problems by pointing out that knowledge is impossible without love.
Harriet’s observations about the people in her world lack any real understanding of or compassion for their behavior. This becomes a critical issue later in the story. Her condescension and lack of empathy made her an unusual female character in her era, as she did not serve as a role model or fit idealized images of child protagonists. In fact, NPR’s 2008 segment “Unapologetically Harriet, The Misfit Spy” contrasts her to Nancy Drew: “Nancy is polite, poised as a ballerina and ever eager to please. Harriet, meanwhile, is brash and disheveled […] And she's full of herself” (https://www.npr.org/2008/03/03/87779452/unapologetically-harriet-the-misfit-spy). As the segment points out, the book was banned repeatedly as inappropriate for young girls, even as girls in the 1960s and 1970s formed Harriet the Spy clubs because they were so drawn to this independent character who was unlike depictions of other girls.
The motif of unusual habits is introduced in the descriptions of Harriet’s fixations on spying, tomato sandwiches, and a cake break after school. Sport’s quirks are also on display when he shows Harriet his financial ledgers. Janie is depicted as a junior mad scientist who wants to blow up the world: “Both Harriet and Sport had a great respect for Janie’s experiments, but they didn’t understand a word she said about them” (29). Harriet’s friends pursue hobbies or assume responsibilities that are unusual for their gender or age in that era, whether as a means of learning about the world or to fill in the gaps when their impractical parents let their own responsibilities lapse. Meanwhile, Harriet’s focus on spying allows her to branch out and explore life beyond her own privileged neighborhood and serves as fodder for her writing, even if she hasn’t yet learned to delve below the surface of what she observes.
