{"id":93057,"date":"2015-12-21T15:00:46","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T20:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93057"},"modified":"2015-12-21T11:50:12","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T16:50:12","slug":"nancy-drew-in-starlight-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/nancy-drew-in-starlight-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Nancy Drew in Starlight"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"lilac\"<\/a>

An illustration from The Mystery at Lilac Inn.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Who is Nancy Drew, really? The instability of\u00a0the girl detective.<\/em><\/p>\n

The writer Bobbie Ann Mason once described the Nancy Drew novels as sonnets, or \u201cendless variations on an inflexible form.\u201d The same could be said of Nancy herself: though outfitted with a few baseline characteristics\u2014her freedom, her wile, her supreme politesse\u2014she\u2019s perpetually shape-shifting throughout the\u00a0series. Alternately sixteen and eighteen, Nancy Drew is a scholar of ancient languages and an amateur archaeologist; a flawless cook, an expressive painter, and a dynamite prom date. She can dance in a corps de ballet and scuba dive fathomless depths. On separate occasions, her friends have walked in on her tap dancing, learning Morse code, and tap dancing in Morse code. Even her hair color is famously inconstant\u2014from book to book, it flickers from blonde to strawberry blonde to her most distinctive shade, Titian, so named for the rosy apricot color used in many of the sixteenth-century Italian\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n

And yet, there are some things Nancy Drew simply does not do. In her decades-long original run of more than fifty books, she never once goes to the movies or mentions an actor by name. Her only brush with Hollywood comes in 1931\u2019s The Mystery at Lilac Inn<\/em>, where she meets the diabolical Gay Moreau, a washed-up actress who\u2019s also a Nancy Drew impersonator, committing petty crimes to defame the detective. Nancy approaches the case with some amusement at her resemblance to a \u201cblonde actress,\u201d but things take a turn for the weird when the starlet kidnaps Nancy, binds and gags her, and, to Nancy\u2019s horror, begins to act<\/em>: Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year! Who is Nancy Drew, really? The instability of\u00a0the girl detective. The writer Bobbie Ann Mason once described the Nancy Drew novels as sonnets, or \u201cendless variations on an inflexible form.\u201d The same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":879,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20653],"tags":[19780,19784,19781,18653,1102,19778,19783,675,7002,5370,13622,12969,995,12280,19782,19786,1373,12919,4214,747,19785,13238,19779,19777,19787],"class_list":["post-93057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2015","tag-anne-sheridan","tag-carolyn-keene","tag-deanna-durbin","tag-femininity","tag-feminism","tag-formulas","tag-gay-moreau","tag-gender","tag-genre-fiction","tag-ginger-rogers","tag-girlhood","tag-hair-color","tag-hollywood","tag-judy-garland","tag-midcentury-fiction","tag-mildred-wirt-benson","tag-movie-stars","tag-mysteries","tag-nancy-drew","tag-novels","tag-platinum-blonde","tag-shirley-temple","tag-starlets","tag-whitman-authorized-editions","tag-womanhood"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWho Is Nancy Drew, Really?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Isabel Ortiz on the instability of Nancy Drew, especially as revealed by Whitman Authorized Editions.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/nancy-drew-in-starlight-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nancy Drew in Starlight by Isabel Ortiz\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 21, 2015 \u2013 We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. 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