"Yours most loquaciously": Voice in Jean Webster'sDaddy-Long-Legs

Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster's novel about an orphan who is sent to college by an anonymous benefactor, has remained in print since its publication in 1912. Commonly regarded as an American Cinderella tale, it is currently marketed solely as a children's book, although it was widely read by adults as well at the time of its publication. It is often included in discussions of other books of the era that focused on orphans, such as Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables—books that James D. Hart dismisses as a "cheery cycle of stories simpering with delight and mawkish with pathos. . . .—no strain upon either adult or youthful reader" (213).¹ Although some critics praise Webster's novel for its compelling heroine and entertaining (if not surprising) plot,² historically much of the criticism has been derogatory. Characteristic of such evaluators, Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig note in You're a Brick, Angela! that Daddy-Long-Legs is "so trivially girlish a book" (107).

Critics have noted that Webster's is an epistolary novel; however, to date no one has pursued its relation to other epistolary works or traced the significance of its genre, particularly within American literary history.³ In fact, Daddy-Long-Legs is perhaps the most enduring example of a popular epistolary tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that emphasized female voice and female education. In this respect, it combines key characteristics of the novel of letters with those of another popular contemporary genre: the college novel. Studying the way these traditions work together in Webster's novel, we learn much more about the significance of the protagonist's evolving voice. In addition, because feminist developmental theory, as exemplified in Women's Ways of Knowing by Mary F. Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule, focuses on and convincingly demonstrates the significance of voice, particularly in the first-person narratives of female college students, it is relevant to this analysis of Webster's novel. As the novel's protagonist, Judy, discovers and experiments with her own literary voice through the letters she writes, she also achieves a much greater authority in her significant relationships with others—an issue of special relevance because there has been such intense debate about the relationship between Judy and Jervis in Daddy-Long-Legs.

In The Epistolary Novel, Godfrey Frank Singer usefully traces the history of the genre from Ovid's Heroides through Richardson's Pamela and Crissa, among others. American as well as English authors have produced this type of literature: as Singer notes, "undoubtedly the epistles of Benjamin Franklin of a familiar nature, in Bagatelles, and the open letters of Francis Hopkinson added something to the literary impulse for letter writing in America. . . . The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy [Boston, 1789], was in epistolary form" (195). Such well-known late-nineteenth-century authors as Henry James and (Webster's great-uncle) Mark Twain experimented with the epistolary genre. Singer particularly notes a "revival of novels in letters in the first decade of the twentieth century" (203), among them Jack London's The Kempton-Wace Letters and William Dean Howells's Letters Home (both published in 1903). According to Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, "Since the sixteenth century, when the familiar letter was first thought of as a literary form, male commentators have noted that the epistolary genre seemed particularly suited to the female voice" (vii), and there are certainly epistolary novels featuring female protagonists that might have served as inspiration for Webster. These include The Familiar Letters of Peppermint Perkins (1886), which, according to Singer, "presents the letters of a modern girl of its period. . . . Her reactions to life and people form the extremely amusing substance of the entire book" (202),⁴ and (paralleling the development of the relationship in Daddy-Long-Legs) Lauriel: The Love Letters of an American Girl (1901), which depicts Laura Livingston's letters to her "friend, later lover, then husband, Rex Strong" (Singer 204). Webster's biographers, Alan and Mary Simpson, suggest that Webster herself "had experimented earlier in her career with...