Book Review: Daddy-Long-Legs
Probably my favorite book that I read for my project - actually, reread, but I don't believe I got as much out of it the first time - was Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, about an orphan girl who goes to college on funds from one of the trustees of the orphan home, who makes a condition of this scholarship that a) he be kept anonymous; and b) she should write him a letter every month about her studies.
He wants her to call him Mr. Smith, but "Why could n’t you have picked out a name with a little personality? I might as well write letters to Dear Hitching-post or Dear Clothes-Pole," complains Judy; so she nicknames him Daddy-Long-Legs.
The book is very like Jo Walton's Among Others, not in any specifics - no magic, for instance - but because the main action of the book is the heroine's intellectual blossoming, and most of the secondary characters therefore remain vague and shadowy.
But that's quite all right, because who wouldn't want to spend three hundred pages with the incomparable Judy Abbott?
Take this as a representative quote. A minister tells them in chapel that "'The most beneficent promise made in the Bible is this, ‘The poor ye have always with you. They were put here in order to keep us charitable.’
The poor, please observe, being a sort of useful domestic animal. If I hadn’t grown into such a perfect lady, I should have gone up after service and told him what I thought."
There's something a bit I Capture the Castle-ish about her voice as well - which also, now that I think, is very much about the heroine's mental growth, though not as tightly focused Daddy-Long-Legs.
So yes. Judy goes to college! She reads and reads and reads to catch up on all the books she missed in the orphan home! (A reader in 1912, when the book was published, could probably use Judy's reading list as a self-cultivating project. It occurs to me that this is one of the advantages of having a defined canon.)
And she wrestles with Latin prose and becomes a socialist and muses about God ("I like the Semples immensely; their practice is so superior to their theory. They are better than their own God. I told them so - and they are horribly troubled. They think I am blasphemous - and I think they are!") and contemplates how to be a good person and a good writer, and it's all wonderfully engaging.
There is, however, just one problem with the book:
Judy marries Daddy-Long-Legs, who turns out to be not nearly as old as she thought. He was the young uncle of one of her roommates, who visited them often. It's not the age gap that gets me, because it's hardly bad at all for a book from the 1900s; it's the fact that he's a total control freak.
For instance, a friend invites her to spend the summer with her family, and Judy wants very much to go - but Daddy-Long-Legs says NO, she's going back to the farm she went to the summer before, because (he doesn't say this, but it becomes clear when we find out who he is) he wants to be able to visit her there, and OBVIOUSLY his desires should trump hers!
Creeper.
I can see why Webster did it. It's hard to end books like this; I wasn't totally satisfied with the ends of either Among Others or I Capture the Castle, because neither end really, but just stop. That being said - she had two perfect places to end it! Judy's graduation, and the publication of Judy's book; either would have worked fine.
But otherwise it's wonderful.
He wants her to call him Mr. Smith, but "Why could n’t you have picked out a name with a little personality? I might as well write letters to Dear Hitching-post or Dear Clothes-Pole," complains Judy; so she nicknames him Daddy-Long-Legs.
The book is very like Jo Walton's Among Others, not in any specifics - no magic, for instance - but because the main action of the book is the heroine's intellectual blossoming, and most of the secondary characters therefore remain vague and shadowy.
But that's quite all right, because who wouldn't want to spend three hundred pages with the incomparable Judy Abbott?
Take this as a representative quote. A minister tells them in chapel that "'The most beneficent promise made in the Bible is this, ‘The poor ye have always with you. They were put here in order to keep us charitable.’
The poor, please observe, being a sort of useful domestic animal. If I hadn’t grown into such a perfect lady, I should have gone up after service and told him what I thought."
There's something a bit I Capture the Castle-ish about her voice as well - which also, now that I think, is very much about the heroine's mental growth, though not as tightly focused Daddy-Long-Legs.
So yes. Judy goes to college! She reads and reads and reads to catch up on all the books she missed in the orphan home! (A reader in 1912, when the book was published, could probably use Judy's reading list as a self-cultivating project. It occurs to me that this is one of the advantages of having a defined canon.)
And she wrestles with Latin prose and becomes a socialist and muses about God ("I like the Semples immensely; their practice is so superior to their theory. They are better than their own God. I told them so - and they are horribly troubled. They think I am blasphemous - and I think they are!") and contemplates how to be a good person and a good writer, and it's all wonderfully engaging.
There is, however, just one problem with the book:
Judy marries Daddy-Long-Legs, who turns out to be not nearly as old as she thought. He was the young uncle of one of her roommates, who visited them often. It's not the age gap that gets me, because it's hardly bad at all for a book from the 1900s; it's the fact that he's a total control freak.
For instance, a friend invites her to spend the summer with her family, and Judy wants very much to go - but Daddy-Long-Legs says NO, she's going back to the farm she went to the summer before, because (he doesn't say this, but it becomes clear when we find out who he is) he wants to be able to visit her there, and OBVIOUSLY his desires should trump hers!
Creeper.
I can see why Webster did it. It's hard to end books like this; I wasn't totally satisfied with the ends of either Among Others or I Capture the Castle, because neither end really, but just stop. That being said - she had two perfect places to end it! Judy's graduation, and the publication of Judy's book; either would have worked fine.
But otherwise it's wonderful.