Book review: Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster

The Mother-Daughter Book Club series induced me to seek out Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, as it is the featured title in book three of the series, Dear Pen Pal.  Thus, it and its sequel, Dear Enemy, became the twenty-second book I read in 2017.  (Even though they are separate works, the edition I read was a two-in-one.)

Daddy-Long-Legs is an epistolary novel made up of letters written by seventeen-year-old orphan Jerusha Abbott to the anonymous benefactor who finances her college education.  She knows only that he is a trustee of the orphan asylum where she has spend her childhood and caught but a glimpse of a tall man walking out the door.  Based on that impression and the condition that she send him monthly letters reporting on her progress, she begins writing to him as Daddy-Long-Legs.

For much of the book, I was wholly delighted, wondering how on earth I had managed to miss this book while reading extensively in the plucky-orphaned-girl genre (i.e., Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna, etc.).  Eventually, however, I understood how this book had been excluded from my childhood: its extolment of Darwinian evolution and fervent socialism in particular. 

In addition -- spoiler alert --
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In addition, there's something creepy and off-putting today about a grown man anonymously grooming a teenage girl to be his bride, and the later triangle of Judy, Jervie, and Jimmie McBride is unfair in many ways.

Dear Enemy is Daddy-Long-Legs's sequel.  The letters in this instance are written from Judy's friend Sallie McBride to Judy (and others) after Judy has persuaded her to take over the orphan asylum where Judy was brought up, the John Grier Home, and run it in a more humane and progressive manner than Judy enjoyed.  It is not as successful as Daddy-Long-Legs but still a good read.