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29/07/2024
Daddy-Long-Legs cover

Daddy-Long-Legs

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Jerusha Abbott, an eighteen year old orphan, faces an uncertain future in the charity home where she has lived all her life. On reaching adulthood, the orphanage can no longer offer shelter to its inmates. Her anxiety leads her into wild speculation when she is summoned to the matron’s office. But a surprise awaits her. One of the visitors, a wealthy Trustee of the orphanage, has offered to fund Jerusha’s college education and fulfill her dreams of becoming a writer. The only condition he makes is that he remain anonymous and that she write to him regularly about her progress. Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster was first published in 1912. It follows an epistolatory format and traces the story through a series of letters exchanged between the youthful heroine, Jerusha and her mysterious benefactor whom she has privately nicknamed Daddy-Long-Legs based on a brief glimpse she caught of him once. The book is a young girl’s classic coming-of-age tale, a genre that includes the Little Women trilogy, the Katy series and the Anne of Green Gables books. Apart from being a heart-warming story, it also reflects the author’s social concerns and her interest in women’s issues and the suffragette movement. It is in a way a Beauty and the Beast fairy tale that reflects the transformation of the characters and their attitudes towards each other and life. Jean Webster was born in New York into a literary family. Her father, Charles Webster was Mark Twain’s business manager and head of Twain’s […]

29/07/2024
Love and Friendship cover

Love and Friendship

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Begun when she was just eleven years old, Love and Friendship is one of Jane Austen’s stories that very few readers may have encountered before. Austen experts feel that this story was written, like many others, only for the pleasure of her family and friends. It is scribbled across three notebooks, in childish handwriting, and the complete work is thought to have been written over a period of six or seven years. It is dedicated to one of her cousins, whom she was very close to, Eliza de Feuillide. Eliza herself was an extremely colorful figure and is thought to have been the illegitimate daughter of the first Governor General of India, Warren Hastings. She was also a witness to the French Revolution where her husband, the self styled Comte de Feuillide was guillotined. For the young Jane, these events must have been sheer inspiration to a writer’s imagination. Love and Friendship takes the shape of an expostulatory novel. Written as a series of letters from Laura to a much younger Marianne who is her friend Isabel’s daughter, it is meant to apprise the young and flighty Marianne about the dangers of infatuation and falling headlong into romantic love. The book offers an early and crucial insight into Jane Austen’s style, her wonderful sense of humor and her take on contemporary society. At times, she portrays events almost in parody form, at others, she is sharp and critical, but as always, the typical Jane Austen brand of gentle, sparkling wit […]