“What in the world has happened to Beth Ellen?” Harriet wonders, just a few pages from the end of Louise Fitzhugh’s classic 1964 novel, Harriet the Spy. Beth Ellen comes into her own as a character in the 1965 novel, The Long Secret.

Harriet is still eleven years old and she sometimes still calls her friend Beth Ellen ‘Mouse.’ 

The Toronto Public Library has eighty-two copies of Harriet the Spy (1964) but only six copies of what was billed as the “Further Adventures of Harriet the Spy” — The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, which was published the following year, and only two copies of Sport (1979). Read More→