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.