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Georgi Petrovitch Girev
Mrs. Deardorff is the director at the Methuen orphanage. Beth describes her as strict and a bully at the school. If a child breaks the rules, the staff tells Mrs. Deardorff, and it is less likely that the child will be adopted. When Beth becomes addicted to the tranquilizers she was given at the school, Mrs. Deardorff punishes her, but Beth criticizes the staff for giving her the tranquilizers in the first place. Mrs. Deardorff then prevents Beth from continuing to play chess despite her talent for it, which Beth resents later in her life.
Mrs. Deardorff Quotes in The Queen’s Gambit
The The Queen’s Gambit quotes below are all either spoken by Mrs. Deardorff or refer to Mrs. Deardorff. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2 Quotes
She grew frantic. They would miss her at the movie. Fergussen would be looking for her. The projector would break down and all the children would be sent into the Multi-Purpose Room, with Fergussen monitoring them, and here she would be. But deeper than that, she felt trapped, the same wretched, heart-stopping sensation she had felt when she was taken from home and put in this institution and made to sleep in a ward with twenty strangers and hear noises all night long that were, in a way, as bad as the shouting at home, when Daddy and Mother were there—the shouting from the brightly lit kitchen.
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Mrs. Deardorff kept her waiting almost an hour. Beth didn’t care. She read in National Geographic about a tribe of Indians who lived in the holes of cliffs. Brown people with black hair and bad teeth. In the pictures there were children everywhere, often snuggled up against the older people. It was all strange; she had never been touched very much by older people, except for punishment. She did not let herself think about Mrs. Deardorff’s razor strop. If Deardorff was going to use it, she could take it. Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was of a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.
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Chapter 6 Quotes
The horrible feeling, at the bottom of the anger and fear, was that she was the weaker player—that Benny Watts knew more about chess than she did and could play it better. It was a new feeling for her, and it seemed to bind and restrict her as she had not been bound and restricted since the last time she sat in Mrs. Deardorff’s office.
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Mrs. Deardorff Character Timeline in The Queen’s Gambit
The timeline below shows where the character Mrs. Deardorff appears in The Queen’s Gambit. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...fish they serve even though it nearly gags her—the staff will tell the director, Mrs. Deardorff. If that happens, Beth won’t be adopted. Some children get adopted quickly—a six-year-old named Alice...
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Chapter 2
One Saturday afternoon, Mr. Fergussen brings Beth to Mrs. Deardorff’s office. She worries that they have found the pills or know that she has been...
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...She turns, but the jar slips from her hands and explodes on the ground. Mrs. Deardorff and Mr. Fergussen call out to her, and other teachers and children come out to...
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...long, and Fergussen drives her back the same evening. He tells her that he thought Deardorff would explode before saying that she’s going to have to stop taking the pills entirely.
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Back at Methuen, Beth sleeps for twelve hours. The next day she goes to Mrs. Deardorff’s office, but she’s surprisingly calm—while getting dressed, she discovered that, despite her trip to the...
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Mrs. Deardorff and two other teachers scold Beth for her behavior, but Beth replies that she can’t...
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Chapter 3
Three years later, when Beth is 12, Mrs. Deardorff calls Beth into the office to meet with an excited woman and a disinterested man—Mrs....
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...Jolene asks what’s wrong, Beth apologizes that Jolene didn’t get adopted. The next day, Mrs. Deardorff goes out with Beth when Mr. Wheatley and Mrs. Wheatley come to pick her up....
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Chapter 13
...they likely don’t help her brain either. She calls Methuen and is shocked when Mrs. Deardorff picks up. Mrs. Deardorff is just as surprised, telling Beth that they’ve been reading about...
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A few days later, Mrs. Deardorff calls Beth and tells her that Mr. Shaibel passed away the previous evening from a...
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...like Benny. It would have been something for Methuen to boast about, but instead Mrs. Deardorff wanted to cut her off from the thing she loved.
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...about the trip—and, Beth knows, to look her over. The women remind her of Mrs. Deardorff, and one of them asks if Beth would give a statement condemning the spread of...
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