Rediscovering Jean Webster

What is it about me these days that I am constantly seeking solace, comfort and pleasure in the books of my youth. Using K as a willing pretext, I've been rekindling the flame I had with Lucy Maud Montgomery and her Anne that too few young girls are reading these days, perhaps because we all live in such complicated times. Anne is too quaint and Green Gables is too old fashioned and Montgomery's prose will likely prove too flowery at for the modern day gal. Get to the point, I imagine them saying. Strangely, K is surprisingly compliant and even receptive - I guess reading aloud helps - I'll warrant I have winning diction.

My rally to modern women today is to acquaint themselves with the pleasures of LM Montgomery and discover the Anne books and the copious joys within. Even if it were just for the first three - Gables, Avonlea and Island.

But I digress. We were talking about Jean Webster.

Browsing in a Bangkok Kinokuniya, I chanced upon a new edition of Webster's Daddy Long Legs which is accompanied by another epistolary novel I was not even aware she had written: a much lesser known tome called Dear Enemy which spins off a Daddy Long Legs character in much the same way Frazier was spun off from Cheers or Lou Grant was spun off from Mary Tyler Moore Show. And it is another epistolary romance. Since my own aborted novel was partially epistolary - I take great interest in the re-reading of this and the first reading of the new. I felt like I had landed a goldmine, some buried treasure that I had not even known existed. Think for awhile what it would be like to see Starwars and go away never knowing that the sequels were even made.

The sheer pleasure of the fact alone is enough to make a girl giddy.

These novels were written in 1912 and 1914. Webster has wonderful turns of phrase and there is a richness and a texture in her language that is inextricably tied to the story she relates. It's brilliant. Brilliant and enviable.