Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy Read Free Page A

which were sold in 150 cities of forty states. Webster was among the most highly paid women writers in the United States. As the author of five best sellers in addition to Daddy-Long-Legs, she earned book royalties averaging more than $10,000 a year. Royalties from the productions of Daddy-Long-Legs, averaging almost $2,000 per week, vaulted her into a whole different league of earnings.
    At the height of her celebrity, Webster published her sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs, another novel-in-letters called Dear Enemy. In her letters, Judy Abbott returns frequently to her dreams of an ideal orphan asylum: “Wait till you see the orphan asylum that I’m going to be the head of! It’s my favorite play at night before I go to sleep. I plan it out to the littlest detail—the meals and clothes and study and amusements and punishments; for even my superior orphans are sometimes bad.” Judy becomes a writer and a mother instead, but she persuades her college roommate Sallie McBride to take over the John Grier Home. Sallie brings her experience as a social and settlement worker to John Grier, and has to contend with the resident doctor Sandy MacRae, a dour Scot who believes in heredity defects and genetics above environment.
    Dear Enemy shows the evolution in Webster’s thinking about these issues, and addresses questions of heredity in a more sophisticated fashion than does Daddy-Long-Legs, with its tributes to Judy’s uniqueness. MacRae and his cohorts are eugenicists who ask whether children’s destinies have been set from birth by bad heredity. Could even those children, if brought up in a good, loving family, turn out all right in the end? What could be done about alcoholism, retardation, even crime? He makes Sallie read the studies of inbreeding popular in the period, horror tales of the degenerate and feeble-minded inbred Jukes and Kallikaks, and starts her thinking about weeding out defectives.
    But Sallie has her own ideas about child care. As she declares, “Orphan-asylums have gone out of style. What I am going to develop is a boarding-school for the physical, moral, and mental growth of children whose parents have not been able to provide for their care.” She emphasizes environment—colorful surroundings, fresh air, appetizing food, pretty clothes for the girls, an Indian-style Adirondack camp for the boys, and self-esteem, private property, and vocational training for all. Sadie Kate Kilcoyne, a feisty orphan, emerges in Dear Enemy as a leader in the next generation of intelligent women. She is, like Judy and Sallie, imaginative, playful, and, perhaps most importantly, a good letter writer. With Sadie Kate’s help, Sallie succeeds in converting the doctor, as well as the children and the Trustees to her methods.
    There are elements of Dear Enemy that are also disguised autobiography. Dr. MacRae is married to a woman who “went insane” and had to be institutionalized, as did their little girl. His wife conveniently dies in time for him to court Sallie. Real life was harsher. In June 1915, McKinney’s wife divorced him on the grounds of desertion. Although divorce was no scandal in Greenwich Village, Webster chose to keep the wedding modest and small. She asked her friend Mrs. Joseph W. Lewis of St. Louis to plan the small September 7, 1915, ceremony. Her only attendants were Lewis’s little son and daughter. After the wedding the McKinneys lived in Manhattan, and at his farm in Dutchess County, New York, where they raised ducks and pheasants.
    Tragically, this idyll did not last long. Webster died from complications of childbirth less than a year after her marriage, only a few hours after the birth of her daughter, Jean Webster McKinney, who survived. Uterine fibroids were cited as the cause in some reports; certainly having a first child at the age of forty carried more risk in 1916 than it does today. Webster’s obituary and birth announcement for her daughter