Mavis Beacon was the top typing teacher in the US before she vanished. The twist? She wasn’t real

 Ageneration of adults learned how to type, thanks to Mavis Beacon. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, an educational software program, launched in 1987 and quickly became a bestseller. To this day, adults who came of age in the Eighties and Nineties remember Mavis’s tutelage. Mavis comes up in fond remembrances on social media; she is frequently referenced when the subject of typing is broached. And, often, people are shocked to learn that the woman who taught them that skill – a figure they remember from their childhood, someone they, in some cases, came to admire – never existed.

Mavis Beacon was a made-up character, conjured up at an age when consumers were still learning how to interact with computers. Creating an avatar such as Mavis was a way of making the software more accessible, the interaction more natural.

Incarnating Mavis was a Haitian-born woman called Renee L’Esperance, spotted behind a cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue by one of the men behind the company that sold Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. A new documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, will examine the character’s legacy and attempt to locate L’Esperance, who fell out of the public eye in the mid-Nineties.Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was a product of The Software Toolworks, a software and video game developer founded in 1990 in Sherman Oaks, California and now headquartered in Novato. The company had experimented with an anthropomorphic character for The Chessmaster 2000, the first computer chess game in the Chessmaster series. 

That program launched in 1986 with packaging featuring a bearded, long-haired, wizard-like character as the titular chessmaster – character actor Will Hare, according to a 2015 Vice article.We felt like if you could believe that you were playing another person, as opposed to a machine, that would make it much more engaging,” Joe Abrams, who later created the character of Mavis Beacon with his business partners Les Crane and Walt Bilofsky, told the publication.

It was Crane, a former late-night television host who turned to the software industry in the Eighties, who spotted L’Esperance at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. L’Esperance, “born into a well-to-do Haitian family”, had fled the regime of François Duvalier, according to a Software Toolworks file read by Bilofsky to The New York Times for a 1998 story. “She had never modelled, and her extremely long fingernails made her an unlikely typist, but when Les looked at her, he saw Mavis,”