This week, we’re reaching for an old favorite – the ever-so-charming Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster! I discovered this book as a child, rummaging through my grandmother’s books (in fact, I believe my copy was her mother’s copy first!), and though it’s nothing much really – just a bit of comic fluff – it holds a warm, soft place in my heart.
Daddy-Long-Legs is an epistolary novel, made up of the letters from one Jerusha “Judy” Abbott, orphan, to her anonymous benefactor, who sits on the board of her orphanage and is paying for her college tuition, based on her promise as a talented writer. As Judy writes faithfully (including humorous sketches like the ones below), through exams, school vacations, and varying moods (she’s often frustrated by “Daddy-Long-Legs’s” refusal to reply), we watch her grow from a lonely, imaginative girl to a young woman, surrounded by friends and full of ambition. And, of course, she falls in love along the way.
This is one of those plots that could go in a very different, more sinister direction, considering the age gap and potential abuse of power in the romance, but Webster isn’t here for that. Judy is lively and independent, even while she remains under obligation to her sponsor. And while Jervis, her love interest, may be occasionally high-handed and crotchety, Judy’s more than ready to give him a fight when she disagrees, which helps to balance the relationship. Can you think hard about it and find things that just wouldn’t fly in a contemporary novel? Yes. But ultimately, it’s mean to be escapist entertainment, and Webster tells the whole thing with such humor and warmth, that it’s hard not to lose yourself in the fun.
–b
Book It With Becca 