Beth Harmon with rook (The Queen’s Gambit)

A Chess Queen

Beth Harmon is the heroine of the series The Queen’s Gambit about a chess prodigy. When she is still very young, in the 50’s, her mother commits suicide and she is placed in a religious orphanage where she is given pills to keep her wise and docile, which will give her an addictive personality. There she meets a maintenance man who plays chess in the basement. He agrees to give her lessons and she soon proves to be very brilliant. When she was 15, she was adopted by a woman whose husband abandoned her and when she won the first tournament she entered, her adoptive mother decided to help her compete. But her addiction problems and her sad past that pursues her will often get in the way.