Daddy-Long-Legs
By Jean Webster
Daddy-Long-Legs is a 1912 epistolary novel by the American writer Jean Webster. It follows the protagonist, Jerusha “Judy” Abbott, as she leaves an orphanage and is sent to college by a benefactor she has never seen. Jerusha Abbott was raised at the John Grier Home, an old-fashioned orphanage. The children depended entirely on charity and had to wear other people’s cast-off clothes. Jerusha’s unusual first name was selected by the matron from a gravestone (she hates it and uses “Judy” instead), while her surname was selected from the phone book.
One day, after the asylum’s trustees made their monthly visit, Judy was informed by the asylum’s dour matron that one of the trustees offered to pay her way through college. He has spoken to her former teachers and thinks she has the potential to become an excellent writer. He will pay her tuition and give her a generous monthly allowance. Judy must write him a monthly letter because he believes that letter-writing is essential to the development of a writer. However, she will never know his identity; she must address the letters to Mr. John Smith, and he never will reply. Judy sees the shadow of her benefactor from the back and knows he is a tall, long-legged man. Because of this, she jokingly calls him Daddy-Long-Legs. She attends a “girls college” on the East Coast. She illustrates her letters with childlike line drawings, also created by Jean Webster.
The book chronicles Judy’s educational, personal, and social growth. One of the first things she does at college is to change her name to Judy. She designs a rigorous reading program for herself. She struggles to gain the basic cultural knowledge to which she, growing up in the bleak environment of the orphanage, never was exposed. During her stay, she befriends Sallie McBride (the most entertaining person in the world) and Julia Rutledge Pendleton (the least so) and sups with them and Leonora Fenton.
Read or download Book
Jean Webster
Jean Webster was the pen name of Alice Jane Chandler Webster (July 24, 1876 – June 11, 1916), an American author whose books include Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy.
Biography
Her best-known books feature lively and likable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books palatable and enjoyable to contemporary readers. In Fredonia, Webster began writing When Patty Went to College, describing contemporary women’s college life. After some struggles finding a publisher, it was issued in March 1903 with good reviews.
Webster started writing the short stories that would make up Much Ado about Peter, and with her mother, visited Italy for the winter of 1903–1904, including a six-week stay in a convent in Palestrina, while she wrote the Wheat Princess. It was published in 1905. The following years brought a further trip to Italy and an eight-month world tour to Egypt, India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, and Japan with Ethelyn McKinney, Lena Weinstein, and two others, as well as the publication of Jerry Junior (1907) and The Four Pools Mystery (1908). Jean Webster began an affair with Ethelyn McKinney’s brother, Glenn Ford McKinney. A lawyer, he had struggled to live up to the expectations of his wealthy and successful father. Mirroring a subplot of Dear Enemy, he had an unhappy marriage due to his wife’s struggling with mental illness; McKinney’s wife, Annette Reynaud, frequently was hospitalized for manic-depressive episodes.
The McKinneys’ child, John, also showed signs of mental instability. McKinney responded to these stresses with frequent escapes on hunting and yachting trips as well as alcohol abuse; he entered sanatoriums on several occasions as a result. The McKinneys separated in 1909, but in an era when divorce was uncommon and difficult to obtain, they were not divorced until 1915. After his separation, McKinney continued to struggle with alcoholism but had his addiction under control in the summer of 1912 when he travelled with Webster, Ethelyn McKinney, and Lena Weinstein to Ireland.
During this period, Webster continued to write short stories and began adapting some of her books for the stage. In 1911, Just Patty was published, and Webster started to write the novel Daddy-Long-Legs while staying at an old farmhouse in Tyringham, Massachusetts. Webster’s most famous work was initially published as a serial in the Ladies Home Journal and tells the story of a girl named Jerusha Abbott, an orphan whose attendance at a women’s college is sponsored by an anonymous benefactor. Apart from an introductory chapter, the novel takes the form of letters written by the newly styled Judy to her benefactor. It was published in October 1912 to widespread and critical acclaim.
Jean Webster
