Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy (2 page)

From 1894 to 1896, she attended a boarding school—The Lady Jane Grey School at Binghamton—where she renamed herself Jean because her roommate's name was Alice as well. But the education offered by a finishing school was not enough to satisfy her intellectual curiosity and her nascent spirit of social reform. In 1897, she entered Vassar College with the class of 1901 to study English and economics. She wrote a number of stories for the Vassar literary magazine,
Vassar Miscellany.
In her sophomore year, Webster roomed with the future poet Adelaide Crapsey (with whom she carried the socialist banner in a campus parade), and the class president, Margaret Jackson. She also spent a semester of her junior year abroad in Greece, England, and Italy, researching a paper on poverty in Italy. Meanwhile, she wrote a column for the
Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier,
for which she earned $3 per week. As the paper later noted, “Miss Webster was the correspondent for The Courier while a student at the college and her letters will be remembered by our readers for the atmosphere of cheerfulness that characterized them. No humorous incident at the college ever escaped Miss Webster's attention. At the same time there was no lack of dignity when serious subjects were under consideration. In addition to her correspondence Miss Webster also contributed a series of articles to The Courier covering her experiences while travelling in Europe.”
²

There are many elements of her Vassar experience in
Daddy-Long-Legs.
During her four years as an undergraduate, Vassar was a college of six hundred women, predominantly Republican in their leanings, while Webster was already a socialist. The college did not support women's suffrage or allow the students to participate in suffrage activism. But Vassar was already becoming known as a literary center; Edna St. Vincent Millay chose it over Smith when she entered as a scholarship student in 1913 (with a monthly allowance of $20, compared to the munificent $35 Judy Abbott receives from her patron). In her English class, Judy is expected to comment on a poem by Emily Dickinson (she is baffled)—an indication of how sophisticated the syllabus was for the period. She also participates in the Field Day athletic competitions between the classes, instituted at Vassar in 1895; and she describes the construction of a new dormitory and the infirmary. Most important, she describes herself as a Fabian socialist, one who is willing to wait while “instituting industrial, educational and orphan asylum reforms.” In 1898, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two of the founders of the British Fabian Society, had spoken at Vassar about “The Scope of Democracy in England.”
³

After her 1901 graduation, Webster energetically pursued a literary career. She published her first piece, an article and photographs about Monte Carlo, in 1902 in the
Buffalo Express,
under the pseudonym “Carly Ward.” For the next several years, Webster regularly submitted stories to various magazines, persisting despite frequent rejection, and within a few years she was selling to
McClure's
and other periodicals. Her first book,
When Patty Went to College,
came out in 1903. Mark Twain read it and congratulated her mother: “It is limpid, bright, sometimes brilliant; it is easy, flowing, effortless, and brimming with girlish spirits.”
⁴
In November 1903, Webster took off again for Rome, where she visited the graves of Keats and Shelley, and stayed at a convent. She continued to publish stories and novels—
The Wheat Princess
(1905) and
Jerry Junior
(1907).

In November 1907, Webster embarked on a year-long journey around the world with her friends Ethelyn McKinney, daughter of the president of the Standard Oil Company of Pennsylvania, and Lena Weinstein, a New York art critic. They visited Egypt, India, China, Japan, Burma, and Ceylon; in a society clipping in her files, the reporter notes that “She is planning, evidently, for very warm weather, for the main portion of her wardrobe consists of twenty-five white dresses.”
⁵
Such a trip and such a wardrobe were hardly the hallmarks of the bohemian, but Jean was much more daring than she may have appeared. In the summer of 1908, she fell in love with a married man—Ethelyn's brother, the lawyer and Standard Oil Company heir Glenn Ford McKinney. A graduate of Princeton, class of 1891, McKinney was married and had a son; his wife, Annette, had suffered periodic attacks of manic depression. In July 1908, Webster and McKinney began a long-term secret affair. According to Anne Bower, Webster's almost daily letters to him “were a study of good cheer, chattiness, and constancy as she encouraged him to fight alcoholism and the frustration of work he did not enjoy.” In July 1913 she wrote to him: “Our salvation is work and work and
more
work. Fortunately we both have some ready to our hands. Set to work with all promptitude and cheerfulness at your farm and accomplish as much as possible against the time when I can look at it with you.”
⁶
Louisa May Alcott could not have put the case for work and duty better.

But Webster was not just a workaholic stoic. On her return from Europe, she settled in Greenwich Village, on West 10th Street. The path from Vassar to the Village was well-trod by feminists, including the suffragists Crystal Eastman and Inez Mulholland. Randolph Bourne aptly described the feminist bohemians of the period to a friend thinking of moving to Greenwich Village: “They are all social workers, or magazine writers in a small way. They are decidedly emancipated and advanced, and so thoroughly healthy and zestful, or at least so it seems to my unsophisticated masculine sense. They shock you constantly.... They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of humor and ability, and innocence and self-reliance, which absolutely belies everything you will read in the story-books or any other description of womankind. They are, of course, all self-supporting and independent; and they enjoy the adventure of life.”
⁷

Webster was part of this generation. While living in New York and writing, she also became more involved with aiding the unfortunate, continuing an interest that had begun in college when she visited institutions for the destitute and delinquent as part of an economics course. She served on committees for prison reform and worked with Sing-Sing convicts. She defined herself as a socialist and marched in the Women's Suffrage May Day parade, but her tactics were usually playful rather than militant. In the spring of 1909, for example, she received a notice demanding that “Jean Webster, Author” appear for jury duty. Of course, women were not allowed to serve on juries in New York or most states, a form of legal discrimination which elicited protest from feminist writers such as Susan Glaspell, in her story “A Jury of Her Peers.” Suffragist friends urged Webster to try to be seated on a jury. Instead, she wrote back on her most feminine stationery (“pale tinted paper, scented with violets”):

She received a letter in response reiterating that she had to appear for jury duty or face a $250 fine. After asking ten lawyers for legal advice, Webster went to court on the appointed day, and was excused.
⁸

Meanwhile, her literary career continued, with the publication of
The Four Pools Mystery
(1908),
Much Ado About Peter
(1909), and
Just Patty
(1911). But
Daddy-Long-Legs,
published in 1912, became the major triumph of her career, an instant and overwhelming success both in the United States and abroad in translation. In one sense, it was about her affair with McKinney; dedicated “To You,” it celebrates the epistolary romance. In another sense, one critic argues, it is “the ideal love story” of a feminist: “a girl is brought by a distinguished man to absolute independence and is then in a position to have an equal relationship with him.”
⁹

In 1914, Webster turned the novel into a stage play starring Ruth Chatterton. It was “the biggest dramatic hit in the country,” and after an extensive run at New York's Gaiety Theatre, played in Minneapolis, Atlantic City, Chicago, and Washington, as well as touring California and London.
¹⁰
In Chicago, it ran for twenty-five weeks to full houses, and it was performed at the Opera House in Poughkeepsie at the special request of Vassar students.

Webster's papers at Vassar College contain her descriptions of each act and her summaries of the main characters. Without the confines of the first-person epistolary mode, Webster is more explicit and didactic about her intentions. In particular, she stresses Judy's innate and perhaps genetic gifts. While the “orphans as a body represent a dead level of mediocrity, the result of bad environment and in some cases bad heredity ... Judy stands out in striking contrast.” She “rises out of the mass, original, resourceful, courageous.... She emerges from her dark background, throws off the trammels that have bound her down and daringly faces life.... There is an element of revolt in her nature, a spirit of
fight
which makes her a fierce little rebel against injustice.”
¹¹

Daddy-Long-Legs
inspired much interest in the plight of orphans. In 1915
Woman's World
reported,

Webster encouraged this interest in orphans with the production of thousands of
Daddy-Long-Legs
dolls, each carrying a message about the needs of children in institutions, 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.