22 November—She Who Must Be Obeyed. Whom does that bring to mind? You’re thinking it’s Hilda Rumpole. She’s the dutiful if overbearing and hypercritical wife of “Old Bailey hack” barrister (as he calls himself) Horace Rumpole in “Rumpole of the Bailey,” the exceptionally long-running British TV series of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, based on the John Mortimer novels. That’s what Rumpole calls her.

Mortimer probably lifted Hilda Rumpole’s She Who Must Be Obeyed sobriquet from Henry Rider Haggard’s highly successful Victorian adventure novel “She,” in which the incredibly ancient but still youthfully beautiful eponymous White queen-sorceress who rules and is worshiped by a black tribe in darkest Africa is called Hiya, which Haggard translates as She Who Must Be Obeyed. Her given name is Ayesha, but that’s not important.

It happens that Ayesha has the hots for young adventurer Leo Vincey, blah, blah, and blah. But being in a Victorian novel, even though Haggard did strategically and successfully flout certain conventions of the era, Ayesha and Leo didn’t get to the rumpy-pumpy. She was old enough to be his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-plus-grandmother, after all, even though she evidently took great care of herself and didn’t look her age.

Anyway, at the end of the book, Ayesha shrivels up, withers away, and dies. Oh, the horror! But that’s not important either. What is important is that She Who Must Be Obeyed is by implication and definition (and, in the novel, by action) an autocrat, an often irresponsible ruler of uncontrolled authority.

And whom does that bring to mind? Think locally and parochially and currently. And Litchfield. And the blessed Borough, ruled by an adamantly totalitarian star chamber, where rights are ignored and the First Amendment is verboten. Thus, it’s obvious that Litchfield’s She Who Must Be Obeyed can be none other than our beloved rookie Senior Burgess, Gayle Carr. QED . . .