Daddy-Long-Legs is a novel that I first read as a kid. It was a big favourite of my Grans. It tells the story in a series of letters of a girl (Jerusha "Judy" Abbott) brought up in an orphanage who is sent to college by a mysterious benefactor, who asks that she writes to him without her knowing his name. All she knows about him is the shape of his shadow, elongated against the wall in the lamplight, and so she refers to him throughout her letters as Daddy Long Legs.
The sequel, Dear Enemy, is written in the same style but this time the protagonist is a college roommate of Judy's called Sallie McBride, who has been given the task of running the orphanage.
Jean Webster has a lively style and the two heroines are smart and feisty enough to overcome a degree of predictability in the plots and hold the reader's interest. Easy, entertaining reads.
On a side note, it was interesting in Dear Enemy to read about the books the Doctor leant Sallie because I'd studied some of them doing psychology at Uni. Mostly they were discussed in disapproving terms because of the pro-eugenics/sterilisation slant. Different times I guess - it's important to remember that it wasn't just the Nazis who were interested in weeding out what they saw as the weak links in society.
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