Dear Enemy

Jean Webster‘s Dear Enemy (1915) is an epistolary novel that transforms the orphanage setting of Daddy-Long-Legs into a sharper Progressive Era inquiry into child welfare, institutional reform, and women‘s social agency. Through the brisk, comic letters of Sallie McBride, newly appointed superintendent of the John Grier Home, Webster blends romance, satire, and reformist realism. Its lively style-witty, observant, and conversational-places serious debates about heredity, education, hygiene, and affection within an accessible narrative of practical experiment. Webster, born Alice Jane Chandler Webster in 1876, was closely connected to the reform-minded culture of early twentieth-century America. A Vassar graduate and grandniece of Mark Twain, she combined literary craft with a sustained interest in social justice, especially the lives of women and children. Her visits to charitable institutions and engagement with contemporary reform movements clearly inform Sallie‘s campaign to humanize an impersonal asylum. Dear Enemy is recommended to readers interested in intelligent popular fiction, feminist literary history, and the social imagination of the Progressive Era. Though some period assumptions require critical awareness, the novel remains vivid, humane, and remarkably engaging.