Dear Enemy, by Jean Webster

Sallie McBride is perfectly content to devote her considerable energies to parties, soirees, theaters, evening gowns, and wooing her perfectly eligible suitor, thank you very much. Her friend Judy’s invitation to become the new superintendent of a sad, overcrowded, badly managed orphan asylum is met with astonishment and a laughing refusal. What could be more absurd? Her—frivolous, city-girl Sallie McBride—stuck away in a bucolic orphanage, saddled with the task of making it over completely?

But Sallie is not the pushover socialite she tries to make herself seen. The eligible suitor laughs, her family pitches a fit—and the contrary Sallie sets her jaw and accepts the job. From the moment she steps foot over the threshold of the John Grier Home, the reader knows she’s hooked for good, even if Sallie herself doesn’t. Daunted and aghast at the state of life for the hundred young orphans thrust upon her care, she takes the place firmly in hand and starts instituting what seems to her the most common of common-sense reforms, beginning with the stenciling of bright yellow rabbits across the top of the gloomy, joyless dining room.

Told in a series of breezy, witty letters from Sallie to Judy, the wife of the asylum’s new president, Gordon, her politician suitor, and to the resident doctor, a morose Scotchman (the “enemy” to whom the title refers), Dear Enemy is a bright-voiced, fast-paced, deeply interesting and entertaining read. Written in the early 1900s, it seems remarkably modern and matter-of-fact on such topics as heredity (several orphans have alcoholic or retarded parents, with sad results), divorce, and women’s rights. Webster clearly did her research—the description of a girl with alcoholic parents matches exactly the modern diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Through her letters, the reader sees Sallie’s character develop and progress. Judy and her president husband know exactly how to manage her—when she threatens to leave, they tell her they’ve found an “inefficient but kindly middle-aged person with no chin” to take her place. Sallie pitches a fit, digs in her heels, and stays—with nothing but beneficial results for the orphans. We learn of her difficulties with the stick-in-the-mud trustees of the Home, especially fractious orphans, her increasingly annoyed—and annoying—suitor, and that exasperatingly complex doctor, whom Sallie nicknames Sandy. Catastrophe strikes, of course—followed by the most unexpected plot twist of a resolution, which only a second read can fully satisfy. This, the reader finds, is no chore.

In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden

It’s a book about a monastery of nuns, all of whom have chosen to spend their days shut away from the world, spending hours in prayer in silence, work and study, steeping themselves in the holy and the pious.

Nice for them, but sounds like a real pill to read. After all, what does the word “monastery” conjure up? A church? A group of people all dressed alike? Incense and candles and Latin? Who wants to read about a group of women who look exactly the same, who do nothing that anyone would call exciting, who order their days like a prayer wheel, repetitious and meditative?

But here’s the thing. In This House of Brede is not boring. It’s not slow. It’s not even preachy, surprisingly enough given the subject matter. The nuns, so superficially alike in their encompassing veils and habits, aren’t. People tend to forget that nuns are women, real women who have their joys and fears and petty dramas. These are not saints or angels but people, strongly drawn characters to whom the reader can relate. Godden introduces and develops them like she’s building a wall out of pearls, not one word wasted, the story and its people slowly forming one glistening whole.

The story—although really the book unfolds more like the days of a life than a novel—revolves mainly around Philippa Talbot, a forty-two-year-old career woman in postwar England. The first time we meet her, she is giving her valuable gold clock to a junior secretary in her office. The sophisticated, successful Philippa is giving up not only her possessions but her job, a high-ranking position in a government office (rare for a woman in those days), to become a contemplative Benedictine nun at Brede Abbey.

Unthinkable! Who does that?

The rest of the book answers that question, but in such a way that the reader doesn’t even know it’s being answered. Godden doesn’t believe in pounding the lesson in with a two-by-four. The reader will turn the last page regretfully and with a sense that she understands the unthinkable action that Philippa—and the hundred other women in the monastery—has done.
To achieve that end, Godden weaves her reader into the book and fools us into thinking that we ourselves know what Philippa knows, we have met and made friends with her fellow nuns, we have made their problems our own. Godden’s style is deep and rich and mesmerizing. The book is long—400 pages—but how profound the disappointment upon realizing, at the finish, that kind Dame Perpetua, wise and quiet Dame Catherine, flighty Dame Veronica, shy, vulnerable Sister Cicely, and all the rest are not strolling in the garden outside, or coming down the hallway to rap upon your door.

Wouldn’t it be great if there really was a place like this?

Oh, wait….