Marguerite Capen Hearsey was born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey. She enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she became a member of Sigma Sigma Sigma. A report in the 1912-13 volume of the Triangle said of her:
Marguerite Hearsey of Hollins Institute deserves great mention and honor, for she is one of the most deserving girls Sigma has known. At Hollins she is gaining quite a reputation, her greatest honor being Editor-in-Chief of the college magazine. We are all proud of Marguerite and wish her greater success.
She also served as Secretary of the Y. W. C. A., and a member of the Student
Council. When the Iota of Virginia chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was installed at Hollins College in 1962, Hearsey was one of eight alumnae invited to become a member. After graduation in 1914, she taught French and English at Georgetown College in Kentucky.
She was the first secretary treasurer of the Association of Pedagogical Sororities (later the Association of Education Sororities) when it began as an agreement between Tri Sigma and Alpha Sigma Alpha. The Panhellenic Representative of Sigma Sigma Sigma, she had spent the summer in Jeffrey, New Hampshire. On her way home, she stopped in Boston, where Ida Shaw Martin lived and they worked on formulating the necessary items for the organization.
During World War I, she worked for the Y.W.C.A. first in Honolulu, Hawaii, and then Boston and New York until 1921. She taught English composition at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania from 1922-24, and earned a Master’s from Radcliffe College in 1923. From 1924-25, she taught at Wellesley College and then again from 1927-29.
She earned a Ph.D. from Yale in 1929. Hearsey was a Sterling Fellow and Elizabethan literature was her field. She also studied at the Sorbonne in France.
In 1929, Hearsey returned to Roanoke and taught English at Hollins, later becoming acting dean of women. While at Hollins, Margaret Wise Brown was one of Hearsey’s students. The author of Goodnight Moon credited Hearsey with encouraging her to pursue writing. Five years after her 1932 graduation, Brown gave Hearsey a copy of When the Wind Blew, her first published book. Brown inscribed it, “Remembering the stumbling words that led up to whatever clarity is here. And always thanking you for the first encouragement.”
Hearsey moved to Massachusetts in 1936 where she became the 14th principal of Abbot Academy in Andover. During her tenure she served as president of the National Association of Principals of Schools for Girls and she was also on the board of the Headmistresses Association of the East.
She retired from Abbot in 1955. A dormitory on the campus bears her name. Abbot Academy merged with the formerly all-male Phillips Academy in 1973. In 2013, Head of Phillips Academy John Palrey closed his talk to the graduating class with the words Hearsey had spoken to Abbot’s Class of 1940 at their graduation:
We have come now to the real good-bye and there is little more that I can say or would say at such time in your personal loves and in this unprecedented and unpredictable world, than ‘good-bye’ with all its original, reverent significance – God be with you.”
Hearsey died on January 22, 1990 at the age of 97.
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