Have you ever been watching a television show or movie, and suddenly one of the characters makes a reference to Wellesley? If you’re an alum, you probably sit up straighter, curious about what the association with the College is going to be: good, bad, or ugly?

Good: Grey’s Anatomy (television series created in 2005, ongoing), in which Miranda Bailey, the gifted, no-nonsense chief of surgery, is a Wellesley alumna. Bad: Working Girl (1988 film), in which Sigourney Weaver’s character, scheming businesswoman Katharine Parker, is revealed to be a Wendy, too. (She appeals to fellow Wellesley alums for donations in a note that asks, “Do we ever really leave Wellesley?”) Ugly: Mona Lisa Smile (2003 film), which portrays Wellesley as little more than an elite finishing school where students are discouraged from pursuing careers. (That is, until a bohemian art professor played by Julia Roberts shows up on campus to liberate them.)

In pop culture, Wellesley is shorthand for all sorts of sins attributed to women: duplicitous ambition, pathetic husband-hunting, East Coast elitism, or outright promiscuity. It’s easy to insert the word “Wellesley” to add a little color to the stereotypical female character, whether she’s the academic grind, the boss lady/bitch, or the unformed girl looking for direction, inspiration, and character-building during her college years—especially if the story takes place in New England or New York City.

But does the same thing happen in books, particularly fiction, referencing Wellesley? There’s more space on the page, more room for nuance. Are there any Wellesley alums who write about the College based on their own experiences, lending the representation greater authenticity?

Follow my exploration of how Wellesley has been portrayed in literature—commercial, literary, genre, and the perennial favorite, the campus novel/coming-of-age story—by alums and non-alums, by women and men. Be prepared for many interesting backstories and a few surprises along the way. (My research has been gleaned from source material and author interviews, but also from the Wellesley Facebook groups Progressions and Wendy Reads It, so my fellow Wellesley alums deserve at least half the writing credit for this piece.)

The view from the outside

There’s a palpable difference in the way outsiders write about Wellesley versus how alums do it, which will become apparent as we proceed.

Classic literature’s most intriguing direct mention of Wellesley College appears in Flannery O’Connor’s 1964 short story “A Revelation.” In this Southern Gothic tale, a Wellesley student named Mary Grace is waiting in a doctor’s office along with her mother and the main character, Mrs. Turpin, who is white, middle class, and solidly Christian. The elder women strike up a conversation, and Mary Grace’s mother points out her daughter’s ingratitude and bad mood. She tells Mrs. Turpin that Mary Grace goes to school “back East,” at Wellesley.

Then, Mary Grace unexpectedly assaults Mrs. Turpin and tells her, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” Mary Grace is given a sedative and bundled away in an ambulance. Yet Mrs. Turpin takes Mary Grace not to be mentally ill, but as a prophet, delivering a revelation from God about Mrs. Turpin’s own moral failings. Combined with Mary Grace’s acne, weight, and the demonic faces she makes at Mrs. Turpin, O’Connor uses Wellesley as a symbol of Mary Grace’s strangeness and unbelonging in the rural Southern town.

The 1955 novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is partly set on the East Coast in college towns. Its protagonist, the literature scholar and pedophile Humbert Humbert, leaves an asylum and settles down in Ramsdale, a small town in New England, where he meets Dolores Haze—Lolita. Later, after kidnapping Lolita and traveling across the country, he returns to the East Coast, to another fictitious town, called Beardsley. Humbert sends Lolita to Beardsley School for Girls, and they live in the house of a chemistry professor on sabbatical who teaches at Beardsley College for Women. Some scholars speculate it’s a stand-in for Wellesley, where Nabokov was a popular comparative and Russian literature teacher in the 1940s. The connection to Wellesley remains unproven, but a short remembrance by one of Nabokov’s Wellesley students, Olga Lawes Melikoff ’48, in the fall 2000 edition of the alumnae magazine lends weight to the possibility. “I remember him asking us what we thought of the name ‘Lolita,’ with its possibilities for such endearing versions as ‘Lo,’ ‘Lola,’ and ‘little Lo.’ This long before Lolita was written,” she wrote.

In a 1977 New Yorker article, another former Nabokov student, Hannah Green ’48, wrote, “I suppose Mister Nabokov did not take us seriously. Certainly, he did not take us personally. After all, we were college girls. No doubt it was we who inspired Humbert Humbert’s extreme distaste for the lot of us.” However, Heather Marshall Jacobsen ’79 recalls her mother, Sidney Smith Marshall ’48, who studied Russian literature in translation with Nabokov, saying, “He treated Wellesley students with tremendous respect and thought they were, as a group, brilliant.”

The famed American Canadian novelist John Irving mentions Wellesley in the opening pages of his bestselling 1978 novel, The World According to Garp, considered both a literary and commercial success. Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother, attends the College in the 1940s; here, Irving uses Wellesley as shorthand for the sedate upper-class life Jenny’s parents expect her to lead. But on the first page, Jenny leaves Wellesley because it’s not feminist enough for her; her fear that she will be “dated and mated” compels her to drop out and become a nurse. Later, she raises her son as a single parent.

After she writes a book called A Sexual Suspect, Jenny becomes a feminist icon and supports the Ellen Jamesians, a group of women who cut out their own tongues to protest the rape and mutilation of 11-year-old Ellen James. Jenny is eventually assassinated by an anti-feminist fanatic, and the Ellen Jamesians hold a memorial for her that men are forbidden to attend (but of course Garp does, because men).

Irving visited Wellesley often during the early to mid-1980s, using the sports facilities and giving lectures and readings on campus in return. Maureen McCurdy Hasset ’84 remembers that in a lecture Irving gave at Tower Court, he said he named the Ellen Jamesians after a similar name—Ellen Stebbins James—that was carved into the stone of the Tower Court fireplace. (James was a philanthropist without connections to Wellesley who made a gift to the College that allowed for the construction of Tower Court after the College Hall fire.)

Irving became warm acquaintances with Tim Peltason, now professor of English emeritus, who was his liaison with the English department. Although Irving’s informal relationship with Wellesley began after the publication of Garp, the book explored issues—feminism, sexual and gender identities, gender-based violence, and motherhood—that were fiercely discussed and debated on campus in the 1970s and ’80s (and onward).

How might Irving have come across Tower Court’s Ellen James before Garp? “Since he grew up in Hanover, N.H., with connections at Phillips Exeter and Dartmouth, it would be pretty surprising if there weren’t some Wellesley women somewhere in his family tree,” says Peltason. “But I don’t know any details.”

Finally, Wellesley makes a brief appearance in Love Story, by Erich Segal, published in 1970; both the novel and the blockbuster film starring Ali MacGraw ’60 were instant hits. The plot is a tearjerker: a rich Harvard jock falls in love with an impoverished Radcliffe nerd, only to lose her to cancer not long after their wedding. Segal wrote the screenplay of the movie first, and was asked by Paramount to turn it into a novel; both were phenomenally successful.

Segal and MacGraw had met years before as students, performing a Shakespeare play at Wellesley; rumor on campus had it that in the screenplay’s first iteration, the heroine, Jenny, was a Wellesley student. President Ruth Adams supposedly refused permission for the production to film on the Wellesley campus; Segal changed Wellesley to Radcliffe and, in the opinion of Margaret Yonco-Haines ’73, took a “slight dig” at the College: Oliver Barrett IV is known for “dating” the women of “Tower Court, Wellesley,” who would collectively be incredulous to learn he has fallen in love with a “Cliffie” before even sleeping with her.

When Wellesley writes it

Naturally, alums write about Wellesley with an insider’s view of the College and its ethos, even if the goings-on are fictitious. Some authors use the opportunity to deliberately set the record straight about Wellesley, take back the narrative about the College from other writers who portray it inaccurately and offensively, and express their appreciation for the place that had such a profound influence on their lives.

Judith Krantz ’48 dominated the 1980s commercial fiction scene with steamy bestsellers including Scruples, I’ll Take Manhattan, and Princess Daisy. Wellesley becomes a part of the story in Mistral’s Daughter, her novel about a French artist on the scale of Picasso and all the women who loved him along the way.

Teddy, daughter of the artist’s mistress, is brought up in America and attends Wellesley in 1945. This is an opportunity for Krantz to wax eloquent about Wellesley in a way that lets you know the novelist herself fell in love with the College: “She could never possibly explain the feelings of embarrassingly violent love she felt for everything about her new life, for every detail of college, from blind dates to each and every girl in her dormitory.” Teddy’s (and Krantz’s) enthusiasm for Wellesley extends to admiration for its beautiful campus, although a fateful scene where Teddy is caught drunk in public takes place in the arboretum.

Krantz’s Wellesley may have been a prudish place, governed by the rules of conservative society—in the novel, an overwhelming majority of Teddy’s class remained virgins until their marriages. Teddy, whose lust for life proves too irrepressible for Wellesley’s rules, goes to New York and becomes a model. (It is Krantz, after all.) But she still finds a place for herself in an environment that encourages women to be smart as well as to enjoy the attentions of men, and she credits the College: “At Wellesley, Teddy had at last found the miraculous arena where it was acceptable to be different.”

In more recent fiction, the wildly successful coming-of-age novel Kinflicks by Lisa Alther ’66 was published in 1976. Its protagonist, Virginia “Ginny” Babcock Bliss, attends Worthley College; details about her academic life, professors, friends, and rivals will sound very familiar to many Wellesley graduates. And there’s a lot of sex, in every iteration possible, all presented as part of Ginny’s exploration of self, sexual identity, and the place of women in the world in that era. Alther was friends with Nobel laureate Doris Lessing and the Sufi mystic Idries Shah; Lessing helped get Kinflicks published by Knopf, and Alther reviewed several of Shah’s books.

Wellesley writers are well-represented in genre fiction, too, with Wellesley showing up in spy and crime fiction. In the award-winning Maggie Hope mystery series by Susan Elia MacNeal ’91, the eponymous protagonist is Wellesley ’37. Her Aunt Edith, a British chemistry professor, also finds refuge at Wellesley, one of the few colleges to hire female faculty in the early 20th century. Maggie is raised on the Wellesley campus by her aunt, who is in a “Boston marriage” with another Wellesley professor.

But Wellesley serves as more than just backstory for Maggie or Edith. In the first book in the series, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, the highest position Maggie is allowed to hold is that of a typist in Winston Churchill’s wartime office. Maggie is very vocal about the lack of opportunities for women and is eager to prove that her abilities are as good as any man’s.

MacNeal explains this aspect of Maggie’s psychology: “I attribute much of Maggie’s feminist thinking and advocacy for women to her Wellesley education and influence.” MacNeal’s books also deliver the clear message that Wellesley women are always ahead of their time, but that society is not always ready for their excellence.

[supporting-images]

Another successful Wellesley author, Katherine Hall Page ’69, specializes in award-winning cozy mysteries. (Earlier this year, Page was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, along with R.L. Stine.) One book in her Faith Fairchild series, The Body in the Ivy, published in 2006, is filled with references to the College. Faith Fairchild provides the catering for a Pelham College reunion on a remote island. A Pelham alum, bestselling suspense writer Barbara Bailey Bishop, had a twin sister who died after falling from a tower in the middle of campus, and the reunion becomes the setting for a revenge mystery that Faith Fairchild must solve while feeding the hungry alums.

Pelham College is, of course, “Wellesley down to [Galen Stone Tower] and other specific locations,” says Page. “All the characters are totally made up, however, as was the crime!” When asked why she wanted to reference Wellesley in the novel, she says, “[Our] time there was such a major influence in our lives and during a time period when we were discovering so much about ourselves. … I had saved things like what was called ‘the Gray Book’—given to freshmen (what would be called first-years now). It listed rules and much more. I had also saved other things dating back to the time in the book, which was my years—1965–69—at the College.”

Page says she was motivated to write The Body in the Ivy after she saw “the absurd movie Mona Lisa Smile.” She also mentions a “negative, inaccurate, supposed nonfiction book” (Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary’s Class—Wellesley ’69 by non-alum Miriam Horn) that, she says, “trivializes and demeans us.” Her mysteries give her the chance to bust the myths and celebrate the connectedness of Wellesley alums. She likes to “slip in” a Wellesley reference in most of her books, which she says is “fun for me and my sisters, now siblings.”

The next generation of Wellesley writers is emerging; Ann Zhao ’24 wrote the young adult novel Dear Wendy while she was still a student. Set on the Wellesley campus, the book is a platonic romance between two Wellesley students who unknowingly compete with each other through their anonymous Instagram accounts, under the handles Wendy and Wanda.

According to Zhao, Dear Wendy is informed by Wellesley’s idiosyncratic online culture, which includes the anonymous Instagram accounts @meals_of_wellesley_college, @wellesley.crushes, and @wellesleycollegegeese. The two main characters in Dear Wendy identify as asexual and aromantic, and the book highlights the diversity of identities on campus today.

Other more recent novels by Wellesley alums feature the College, among them An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer ’96, in which a Wellesley student discovers a secret Shakespeare society, and Small Admissions by Amy Poeppel ’88, which follows a group of Wellesley grads through their lives in New York City’s competitive prep school scene. The campus will also be featured in an upcoming installment of Amy Chu ’89 and Soo Lee’s graphic novel series that’s a modern update of the classic Gothic vampire novel Carmilla—and is queer, feminist, and draws on Chinese folklore.

Wellesley has always been fertile ground for writers—a glance at any issue of the magazine’s Pages & Playlists section is enough to prove that. Alums do more than use Wellesley as a backdrop, though—in some cases, the College becomes an integral part of the story, almost a character in its own right. And the more writers Wellesley produces, the more it will be portrayed as many alums feel it deserves to be: as a place of tremendous academic achievement, freedom, and personal growth. And fun. So much fun.