The Jessica Letters

The Jessica Letters sounded as if it ought to be a good book: a young woman from Georgia starts writing book reviews for a paper in New York. After traveling to the city and meeting the paper’s editor, they begin to correspond, and eventually fall in love. Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with it. In practice, it’s pretty awful.

Philip, the editor, is smug and condescending and talks a lot about how man has a dual nature and woman a single one. Jessica is arch and stereotypically feminine, and the authors have tried to make her at once intellectual and an angel in the house type, and it doesn’t really work. And then there’s a whole melodramatic thing with Jessica’s father not allowing her to correspond with Philip, which mostly serves to show us that he’s even more self-involved that he originally appeared.

And you know the bit at the end of Jane Eyre where Jane and Rochester apparently communicate telepathically? There’s a thing like that in The Jessica Letters, too, only more so.

I think I might have found it all very interesting on some level if I hadn’t been so busy cringing.

At least it was short.

Rita

Next comes Rita. Rita in this book makes sense as an expansion on Rita in Three Margarets. But she’s also really annoying. Rita lives in Cuba, and in Three Margarets she was constantly talking about Spain’s oppression of Cuba and doing interpretive dances and stuff. But now the Spanish-American War is on, and Rita’s still being melodramatic and silly and actually causing trouble for the people who are really fighting.

Molly Make-Believe

So, I just read another Eleanor Hallowell Abbott story: Molly Make-Believe. And it’s a full-fludged romance novel this time — although a very small one — which is sort of not in its favor.

Molly Make-Believe tells the story of a winter in the life of Carl Stanton, a young businessman who is confined to his bed by his horrible rheumatism. He has recently become engaged to a girl named Cornelia, although it hasn’t been announced yet. Carl’s doctor is astonished to discover that Cornelia is going South for the winter in spite of the fact that Carl is ill, but, as Carl puts it, “Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and March.”

Olivia in India

I come across many funny things in my reading, but rarely do I find a line as memorable as “John Bunyan, you’re in the sun without your topi.”

Explaining it would only detract from its charm.

Dear Enemy

I’ve just reread Jean Webster’s Dear Enemy for an English paper I’m writing. It’s the lesser-known sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs, in which orphan Judy Abbot is sent to college by one of her orphanage’s trustees, and the two end up falling in love. In Dear Enemy, Judy and her husband ask Sallie McBride, Judy’s college roommate and best friend, to take over the management of the orphanage and make it a less awful place to live.