Dear Enemy

Sallie McBride agrees to run the John Grier Home for a few months as a favor to her college friend Judy, and stays because the work gets under her skin. Jean Webster’s 1915 sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs is again told in letters, most of them to Judy, some to Dr. Robin MacRae, the prickly Scottish physician whose feuding with Sallie gives the book its title. She throws out the uniforms and the institutional diet and takes on the trustees, while Webster works in the orphanage reform she campaigned for in life. Parts of it carry the heredity theories fashionable in 1915, which read strangely now. The comedy and the fight in it still land. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.