English · Beginner
Read Daddy-Long-Legs in Englishwith every sentence explained
Jean Webster · 1912
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster was first published in 1912. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 36,900 words.
An orphan girl. A mysterious stranger. A college education, paid for by letters.
Jerusha Abbott is seventeen and the oldest child at the John Grier Home, a gray, strict orphanage where every day is the same. Then one afternoon, everything changes: a rich trustee has decided to send her to college. There is just one condition. Once a month, she must write him a letter, and he will never write back.
She has never seen his face, only his long, thin shadow on a wall, so she calls him "Daddy-Long-Legs." Renaming herself Judy, she pours everything into her letters: funny, honest and full of little drawings, describing new friends, hard exams, first dances and her dream of becoming a writer.
Told entirely through Judy's letters, this warm, witty 1912 novel is easy to read and impossible not to love.
- Author
- Jean Webster
- First published
- 1912
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Romance, Young Adult
- Length
- About 36,900 words
How it opens
The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day—a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste. Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bed without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and all ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir,' whenever a Trustee spoke.
Reading Daddy-Long-Legs in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
