Dear Enemy

Description

Dear Enemy is a novel by Jean Webster, the pseudonym for Alice Jane Chandler Webster, perhaps best known for her Daddy-Long-Legs, to which this book is a sequel. The novel was a best-seller when it was first published in 1916 and its freshness, its warmth and its great style still makes it extremely popular among today’s readers.

Dear Enemy features Judy Abbott, the protagonist of Daddy-Long-Legs, but this time she is not the principle character, but one of the addressees of the letters that make up the novel. The novel follows an epistolary structure, composed entirely of the letters written by the protagonist, Sallie McBride to her best friend, Judy and to others including Judy’s husband, Sallie’s fiancé and the doctor at the orphanage she works at, an embittered man to whom the letters starting Dear Enemy are addressed to. After Sallie and Judy finished school, Judy bought the orphanage they both spent their childhood in and she asked Sallie to become the manager of the institution.

The novel itself is entertaining just as much as educative – the themes covered in the letters include child rearing practices, the way women’s work was regarded, divorce and many other social problems of the time the novel was written, the early 20th century. The letters recount the protagonist’s daily adventures and events in her life as the orphanage superintendent and they also mark the progress of the protagonist from being a socialite to becoming a mature and responsible woman.

The book is a real page turner. The author is a master of character building and storytelling – the relationships depicted, such as the relationship between Sallie and the orphanage physician, are all complex and complicated, and the ideologies presented on accounts of the events experienced by the protagonist outline the way society treated reacted to certain problems at the beginning of the 20th century.
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