How to get in to Harvard

Step One: Die in 1888.

Two years ago, I wrote about Mary Tynan,¹ a young woman who died in Boston in the late nineteenth century.

During the last decade of her life, Mary² was cursed with a type of inconvenient fame — the kind that led to an obituary in the New York Times, but not, as far as I can tell, a dollar, a dime, or a moment of peace — because she was believed³ to be the…