As a correspondent (and I can only imagine as a friend in real life) Judy is funny and heartfelt. She’s instructed to write him letters on the proviso that he will never answer, or likely even read them. Published in 1912, this epistolary novel is the story of an orphan girl, Jerusha ‘Judy’ Abbott, sent to college by a mysterious benefactor. The stand-out for me was Jean Webster’s Daddy Long-Legs. Many of Louisa May Alcott’s novels ( Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins) could also easily sit within this genre despite being published a few decades early.

Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. The young women of these novels were usually toying with ideas of marriage and career - a notable example is L.M. A variant on the boarding school theme, these stories were set in fictionalised versions of women’s colleges and are credited as playing a part in normalising the idea of higher education for women. I consumed nearly everything I found on my family bookshelves and it was thanks to my grandmother (by path of my mother and older sister) that I first came across ‘College Girl’ stories – novels that were published around the early 1900s and predated our understanding of ‘adolescence’. I was a vicious reader as a child, an obsessively competitive MS-Readathon participant with a penchant for developing intense literary crushes (please see here). Here, Bronte Coates talks about Jean Webster’s In our new Retro Reads series, we remember books from our past.

Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster