"The Three Musketeers"-Friends From The Class of 1937

Hazel Barnes, Evelyn Wiltshire and Agnes Gross became friends at Wilson and remained close for the rest of their lives. They each went on to earn PhD’s – Hazel’s in Classics from Yale; Evelyn’s in Psychology also from Yale; and Agnes’s in Modern Languages from Middlebury College. In Hazel’s autobiography, she wrote, “For the most part we kept to ourselves. I think it was William James who said, ‘Joy is conscious growth.’ I suppose that is why the three of us found our lives in Wilson’s sheltered environment so exhilarating. Perhaps it was the absence of heated debate on sociopolitical issues that left room for the intense intellectual fervor that our traditional studies evoked in us, that and the enthusiasm for knowledge and learning our professors genuinely felt and were able to communicate to us.  

Hazel became the United States' leading scholar on Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. She had a television series called Self-Encounter in 1961. The Barnes Prize at the University of Colorado, named in her honor, awards a $20,000 prize each year to the faculty member with the best research and teaching.

Evelyn spent her career at Tufts University, where the Psychology Department’s Child Development Laboratory is named in her honor. 

Agnes was a leading scholar on the French dramatist, Jean Giraudoux, and spent most of her career at the University of Massachusetts.