Daddy-Long-Legs

Jerusha Abbott, the oldest orphan in the John Grier Home, is sent to college by a rich trustee whom she has seen only as a long shadow thrown by car headlights. The only condition is that she write him a letter every month, which he will never answer. She calls him Daddy-Long-Legs, and the whole novel consists of her lively letters, with her own funny drawings, about lessons, friends, books she has never read before, clothes, socialism, votes for women and her slow discovery of who she is. Meanwhile she falls in love with her roommate's charming uncle, Jervis Pendleton.

Jean Webster (1876–1916), a grandniece of Mark Twain, published the book in 1912, and its wit and warmth have kept it popular around the world; it has been adapted into a musical and Japanese animation. Its heroine's appetite for books and independence recalls Jo in Little Women.