Daddy-Long-Legs [Hardcover]

An orphaned girl named Judy Abbott and an unknown, unseen benefactor who sends her to college and whom she refers to as "Daddy-Long-Legs" are the two principals in this immensely popular modern-day fairy tale. Told through Judy's letters and illustrated by her own quaint drawings,DADDY-LONG-LEGSis a profound and tender homage to the power of awakening love.Jean Webster(1875-1916) was born in Fredonia, New York, the daughter of Charles L. Webster, who was Mark Twain's publisher and business partner. Educated at Vassar College, she must have been a woman with a strong social conscience, perhaps aroused by her visits as a student to orphanages and other institutions (part of her economics course: her degree was in English and economics). She was always concerned for the plight of children who began life with such disadvantages and later she served on committees for prison reform and regularly visited Sing Sing jail. She wrote a number of novels that are now forgotten, but the last two,Daddy-Long-Legs(1912) and its sequelDear Enemy(1915), have survived both in book form, stage and film versions, and a British musical comedy Love from Judy produced in 1953. In 1915 Jean Webster married Glenn Ford McKinney. She died a year later, the day after the birth of her daughter. Blue Wednesday

The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day--a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste. Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bed without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and all ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, Yes, sir, No, sir, whenever a Trustee spoke.

It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldest orphan, had to bear the brunt of it. But this particular first Wednesday, like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a cllãâ