Word: headmistresses
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...months before the Westchester County court decides whether a new trial is warranted. Meanwhile, life in prison continues for Harris, who celebrated her 60th birthday over the weekend. Now living in a special house with private rooms at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the former headmistress of Virginia's fashionable Madeira School for girls spends her mornings making quilts or writing, her afternoons working with expectant mothers. Even the prospect of eventual freedom holds no great joy. "I'm like a Pilgrim woman captured by Indians," says Harris, "who, when she is returned, belongs...
Three years after Jean Harris fired four bullets into Herman Tarnower, the case of the headmistress and the diet doctor still has the power to engage our imagination. The public's appetite for details of the murder trial had been whetted by the social standing of the protagonists, as Diana Trilling pointed out in her brilliant 1981 study, Mrs. Harris. But the abiding fascination of the case resides in the story of the high-minded, stylish lady who descended to the depths of self-abasement and violence...
...that partisanship does not prevent her from leading the reader through every squalid stage of Harris' 14-year affair with Tarnower. The Scarsdale physician, the son of humble Jewish immigrants, was a relentless social climber, impressed by the gracious airs and cultivated ways of the classy, Waspish headmistress. Soon, however, he reneged on his proposal to marry her and embarked on a series of affairs. All the while, he kept Harris on the leash she handed...
...vapid. One cannot stir a tempest in a thimble. Davies' Rose is a teacher in a Midlands elementary school who is busily donning her New Woman persona on the threshold of middle age. She insists, perhaps understandably, on being called Ms. Strong, instead of Mrs. Fidgett. This flusters Headmistress Smale (Beverly May) and the older staff, as do her theories of education, which smack of the bankrupt experiments of the '60s. She has no use for learning by rote. She wants children to play teachers, to make up their own work assignments, and for every one to "have...
...tables and plants. Each floor has a recreation room with a television set, and if Harris becomes a star prisoner, she may some day watch TV and cook in her own cellblock. There is a school on the premises, though many of the courses may not interest a former headmistress: remedial English, auto repair, IBM keypunching, hairdressing. Bedford Hills is not an oppressively grim place to serve a sentence, but, as one guard says, "the hard thing is to be inside. You can make a prison almost a paradise, but if you can't leave, it remains a prison...