Mildred Benson ... "women are entitled to their freedom, but they shouldn"t use it as an excuse for licence".
 
     
 

Mildred Wirt Benson, Writer and journalist, 1905-2002
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, was far better known than her main creator, Mildred Wirt Benson, who has died aged 96.
The reason for Benson"s 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.
Benson, known as Millie - she had been contributing a weekly column, On the Go with Millie, to the The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Iowa, until January - 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 $US125 with no royalty - and wrote not just one but 23 Nancy Drew titles, published between 1930 and 1953.
Once the secret was revealed, 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 licence".
In the 1970s, when Nancy was cited as a pioneer of the women"s liberation movement, Benson preferred to say that she was an individual and that she would have believed in "the family".
The books were translated into 17 languages and sold more than 30 million copies around the world. The remarkable thing was that the stories continued to appear fresh to successive generations long after the things that Benson had introduced as modern had become commonplace.
The youngest of two children, Benson was born in Ladora, Iowa. She always wanted to be a writer and sold her first story to a magazine when she was 12. She studied journalism at the University of Iowa, completing her degree in 1927 and adding a master"s 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, including individual titles under her own name such as Dangerous Deadline and the Penny Barker series.
She thought the Penny Barker books were every bit as good as Nancy Drew but complained that they didn"t receive the same marketing and therefore were never as popular.
She was devoted to the readers of all her books and continued to reply to their many fan letters until her eyesight began to fail. While writing the books she continued to work as a journalist, first for the Toledo Times (where she met her second husband, George A.Benson, whom she married in 1950) and, after "retiring" from there, for The Blade.
She was a tireless writer, starting in the early morning and continuing late into the night: one year she wrote 13 books while also holding down a full-time job - which, as she said, takes a good deal of work. It was fitting that she was still writing up to her death.
Both her husbands died before her. She is survived by her daughter, Penny Wirt

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