Daddy-Long-Legs

Jerusha Abbott has spent all seventeen of her years at the John Grier Home, the orphanage where she now does the ironing and looks after the younger children in exchange for her keep. Then one of the asylum's anonymous trustees offers to send her to college and pay her way, on three conditions: she must write him a monthly letter about her progress, she must never try to learn his name, and she must never expect an answer. She has glimpsed him only once, from behind, retreating down a corridor — tall, and, in the lamplight, apparently all legs. She addresses her letters to "Mr. John Smith" and then, because that feels absurd, to Daddy-Long-Legs instead.

The whole novel is those letters: four years of them, funny, restless, and increasingly self-aware, as a girl who arrived at college not knowing that most families keep their own children finds out what an ordinary life — roommates, examinations, a farm in the summer, a family she gets herself half-adopted into — is actually like from the inside. Webster, herself a Vassar graduate and the grand-niece of Mark Twain, drew on her own college years and on real conditions in New York's orphan asylums, which she had visited as a student; the letters carry the research lightly, in the shape of a girl's own voice rather than a case study.

Bibliomancer restores the 1912 text exactly as Webster wrote it.