with glass panes in the doors. He never forgot the way the lovely brunette looked in her prim white evening uniform, and this image and others like it found their way into his fiction for years to come.
The night of the senior dance in the spring of 1916, a Yale boy threw a paste jar through Ginevra and her roommate’s open dorm window, and they and others leaned out to talk to the boys. When Miss Hillard heard about this, she flew into a rage and called Ginevra and two others to her office. “Well, she told us we were bad hussies’—‘adventuresses’—‘honey-combed with deceit’ etc etc—that ‘our honour was stained,’ ‘rep. ruined,’ ‘disgrace to school’ and the rest of her usual line and a lot more—But that was all very well—as we had done a foolish (not however disgraceful), thing and of course we had to take our punishment,” Ginevra wrote to Scott. The headmistress, however, went on and then asked them to leave school.
Ginevra telephoned her father, who was in New York on business, and he soon arrived. Miss Hillard had evidently reconsidered the expulsion and was “sweet as sugar to Father, even if he did tell her a few plain truths about herself—You wouldn’t have known her for the same woman,” the letter continued. Nevertheless, Mr. King insisted that Ginevra leave with him the next morning. After Miss Hillard sent him a letter “flattering me to the skies,” Ginevra wrote Scott, her father replied, accusing the head-mistress of “unjustness—unfairness and partiality,” and telling her that with her temper she should not be head of a school. Ginevra was so despondent about the incident with Miss Hillard, whom she called “a demon” in the letter, that she lost seven pounds. Her father refused to allow her to return to Westover for her fourth and final year, and she spent her senior year at a school called Miss McFee’s on West 72nd Street in New York City.
Ginevra later haughtily rejected her suitor, but Fitzgerald never forgot his first love. She was his model for the beautiful but unattainable girl he often wrote about, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Ginevra as well as Westover appear lightly disguised in a number of other works. His short story “A Woman With a Past,” for example, describes an incident in which a headmistress of a girls’ school finds a laughing girl lying in the arms of an embarrassed young man after accidentally falling down steep chapel steps. “Unexpectedly, monstrously, just as it had begun to mean something, her school life was over,” the story goes, but not without adding that the prim and hysterical headmistress should really have been running a reform school.
Like Ginevra, most students came from homes with servants, but at Westover they were expected to make their beds and do other chores. Miss Hillard believed that wealth came with responsibility, and she was on a crusade to build character. In 1911 she noted with satisfaction that a girl from “an elaborate and luxurious home” was distributing clean laundry. A member of the class of 1914 remembered a classmate crying in frustration because her long hair had become tangled and matted, so her friend showed her how to brush it out herself and wind it back up on her head. Although tuition was one thousand dollars plus extra fees (Miss Hillard hoped, unrealistically as it turned out, to eventually reduce it after the school’s loans were repaid), the headmistress proposed that ten thousand dollars be set aside each year for scholarships. In her effort to instill down-to-earth values and interests in her pupils, she wanted to enroll daughters of professors, clergymen, and other middle class professionals. Her girls were told all the time that she expected them to use their privileges and expanding opportunities for the betterment of all. She was impressed by the way English boys’ schools produced pupils with high principles, who settled throughout the world like missionaries. “It is our aim to send graduates out to support civilization,” she would say to parents. “It is our hope to send them out into Vanity Fair fortified.”
No one knew which girls were on scholarship, and a rule banning jewelry and mandating uniforms tended to hide differences in wealth. In the fall of 1909 a tailor from the Abercrombie & Fitch department store in Manhattan arrived in Middlebury to measure for the uniforms that Miss Pope had designed. For classes there were khaki cotton dresses with detachable white starched linen collars and black silk Windsor ties along with brass buttons with the same Tudor rose as in the emblem over the front door; the day uniforms also had black patent leather belts with brass buckles stamped with the school seal and containing the motto. For afternoon walks there were tan corduroy skirts and camel hair polo coats with black beaver hats. Full bloomers made of nine yards of black pleated wool, worn with black stockings, white blouses, and gray sweaters were put on for sports. And for dinner in the evening the girls were to wear embroidered white voile dresses that went almost to the ground with soft wool capes in one of many different colors. “I think the freedom our handsome uniforms gave in their anonymity was symbolic. I can still feel the shock of Sunday, when for a few hours we reverted to our own clothes and a whole dreary world of complex gradations in taste, income, and social background suddenly sprang up only to vanish as we resumed our innocent and kindly round of uniformed school life,” recalled a pupil at the time.
Girls in evening uniforms and capes leaving chapel. WESTOVER SCHOOL ARCHIVE.
The importance of feminine values was emphasized in a 1909 issue of The Lantern, the school literary magazine, when it linked each letter in the name of the school with a virtue—womanliness, earnestness, sweetness, truthfulness, orderliness, vigor, enthusiasm, and righteousness. By adhering to these ideals, girls would learn “the very great art of living,” the editors earnestly explained in a high-minded way. Living in an idealistic community “creates mental responsiveness, stimulates liveliness of mind, and makes possible that interchange of humor, wit, and sentiment that makes the best fertilizer for the garden soil of civilized life,” Miss Hillard would write in an essay in her late sixties. She eventually established at Westover an honor system, which was explained in the initial issue of The Lantern every year. Perhaps it was instituted because of persistent misbehavior. Rebellions against rules and restrictions often took the form of eating forbidden foods in the big closets at night. When Elsie Talbott was class president in 1913, she failed to report that her roommate had hidden contraband chocolates in the covered chamber pot in their room. The honor system valued honesty, studiousness, neatness, loyalty, kindness, and consideration of others. Its existence meant that there were relatively few rules, even though every September Miss Hillard gave incoming students a long lecture about them. Decades later an alumna called it “a code of honor and an idealism which a little at a time I came to accept so joyously that I believed the most complete happiness I could possibly know would be if my life could in some way fulfill [it].”
School traditions were intended to endorse this idealism. The first year Miss Hillard introduced a number of ceremonies and songs including the school anthem, “Raise Now to Westover.” The autumn day when everyone was given a lantern to carry outside in the evenings soon became a lantern ceremony in the spring, a picnic with a big bonfire, games, and singing, when the headmistress lit a girl’s lantern from hers and whispered a few words of warning or encouragement about the strength of her metaphorical flame. The chapel was decorated with pine wreaths and boughs at Christmas and with white chrysanthemums and lilies at Easter. Repeating familiar rituals every year was a way to enforce loyalty to enlightened values, the headmistress believed. “Creation and presentation of beauty for its own sake is a constant enrichment of school life,” she would later write. Furthermore, she believed that such beauty would lead to “a life of harmony, proportion, sincerity, and happiness.”
In 1912 Mary Hillard had turned fifty, and as she lost her youthful slenderness, she gained a greater sense of presence. “Instead of any hurry in her walk there was balance and power, [and] at times she seemed to sweep along through the corridor or across Red Hall as if without effort,” recalled an observer. She spoke or read poetry in her lilting voice to girls in the chapel, the dining room, the schoolroom, and her sitting room. She greeted each girl as she arrived for breakfast in the morning, said good night after evening chapel, greeted them or said goodbye when they returned or departed for vacations; one year as she stood by the door in her cape before Christmas vacation, a girl
