Non-fiction
Not Your Average Schoolteacher
Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era by Lauren Kessler (Perennial $14.95)
Elizabeth Bentley was descended from Puritans. Her mother's family, the Turrills, practically founded the town of New Milford Connecticut, where she was born. She attended Vassar on scholarship and went on to become a teacher at Foxcroft, an elite boarding school. Somewhere, Bentley's life took an unexpected detour: By the 1940s she had become the handler of one of the largest Russian spy networks in America, using sources at the highest levels of the U.S. government. When she turned on the Russians in 1945 and told her story to the FBI, she became infamous as "The Red Spy Queen" and the hearings resulting from her revelations kick-started the McCarthy Era. more
This fascinating biography recounts Bentley's life and describes her conversion to communism during the depression when she lived in New York City. Bentley's membership in the party morphed into espionage when she volunteered to spy on an employer (the Italian Embassy), and then when she was recruited and trained in more serious espionage by a Russian higher-up who would become her lover.
Born in New Milford Connecticut to a school-teacher and a businessman from Massachusetts, Bentley spent her early childhood in Connecticut. When she was seven, her parents left behind a large extended family and deep roots to follow her father Charles to various towns and various jobs (it is unclear why he left the newspaper job after only a year). Elizabeth remained a good student, but was always a loner, the fate of the new kid in town. Elizabeth Bentley would remain a loner, graduating from Vassar without making a single friend. Both her parents died before she started teaching at Foxcroft. In spite of the large family she and her parents had left behind in Connecticut, it appears neither Bentley nor her parents ever had contact with them again after they moved away. Why? The author makes much of Bentley's feelings of loneliness and isolation when she arrives back in New York from her Italian sojourn. Bentley is unemployed and barely able to scrape by at that point, and it would be natural for her to reconnect with her relatives (granparents, aunts, uncles, cousins) during those tough times, but Bentley considers herself adrift and alone, and the author never addresses or explains the absent family connection. This is a major hole in Bentley's story, because the author contends that Bentley's feelings of loneliness and isolation led her to join the communist party. The politically radicalized young Elizabeth wasn't destined to become a suburban housewife, but surrounded by family she probably would have exercised her beliefs very differently.
Nevertheless, this well researched and compelling tale succeeds as both biography and history -- full of sex, politics and intrigue, it recounts the private and political life of a woman who commits extraordinary crimes against her country, and also provides an intimate look at the rise of communism in America during and after the Depression, and the circumstances that lead to the McCarthy era.
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