Daddy-Long-Legs, by Jean Webster
What is is about young, aspiring authoresses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? They all decide to write high-flying, romantic stories and novels, which are inevitably rejected by a bevy of publishers until the main male in their lives tells them to "write what they know," and then suddenly they're wildly successful? You would think that after a while they could figure that out for themselves. Interestingly enough, the three or four such examples (Jo March, Anne Shirley, Betsy Ray, Judy Abbott) I'm thinking of were themselves created by female writers, so perhaps there is something biographical at work in the revelation.
Jerusha "Judy" Abbott is the heroine of Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs. She's an orphan (perhaps the single most utilized trope in YA fiction) who is "adopted" by one of the faceless trustees of the asylum in which she has grown up. This trustee, who wishes to remain anonymous, decides to send Judy to college so that she may become a writer. He is to pay for her room and board and provide her with an allowance, besides. In return, all she has to do is send him letters about her studies and progress. The catch is that she doesn't know who he is. He remains anonymous, known only as "Mr. John Smith," and he never returns any of her letters.
The novel, then, is epistolary, but entirely one-sided; comprised of Judy's letters to Mr. Smith (or Daddy-Long-Legs, as she decides to call him. All she knows about him is that he's very tall.) They follow her through four years of school as she learns to acclimate to the "real world," makes friends and gains a few admirers, struggles with her studies, does indeed manage to publish and gain notoriety as a writer and basically grows up. Her experiences as an orphan shape her view of the world, and as she matures, we begin to see a very independent and socially-conscious young lady emerge.
I'm not going to give away any more than that ... the denouement of the novel is, in my opinion, completely obvious to everyone but Judy throughout, so it's not worth spoiling. That could just be me, though. Jean Webster went to Vassar (on which Judy's school is clearly based), and I used to work there in Special Collections and Archives. They've got Webster's papers, and researchers were always coming to use them, so I knew a lot about this little story before I finally got around to reading it. But anyway.
I don't want to make Daddy-Long-Legs sound derivative at all. It's a really charming little story. It does seem to me to have various qualities of other novels like A Little Princess and the Anne of Green Gables stuff (although DDL predates Miss Shirley, just barely), but despite the similarities, Judy's voice is entirely her own. Because she is sent to a "nice" ladies' college, she rubs shoulders with more affluent peers, and so her thoughts about society are quite interesting. She notes that her friends take their happiness for granted because they've always had it, and she talks quite a lot about reform and running her own asylum someday, where instead of "duty" as the chief attribute to be molded in young people, she will stress the importance of "imagination". As her college career comes to an end, she begins to argue with her mysterious benefactor on points of funding - she receives scholarships and job offers which he doesn't want her to take advantage of, but she argues that she wishes to pay him back for his kindness and no to become used to having things handed to her. A very independent young lady, indeed!
I really like YA novels that were written during the turn of the century. The depictions of life during that period of time are always interesting, and one can sort of trace the changing role of women in society. In DDL, Judy often talks about "when women have the vote." Much like Louisa May Alcott, Webster was pushing her own social agenda with her fiction. Nowadays I think we take things like higher education and civic ability for granted, and it's good to be reminded that that wasn't always the case. I have a brand-new daughter, too, so I look forward to sharing these accounts of history with her as well.
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