Nonfiction November: Be the Expert...Louisa May Alcott

For week 3 of Nonfiction November, the focus is Be The Expert/ Ask the Expert/ Become the Expert and is hosted by Veronica at The Thousand Book Project. 

First of all, I can in no way, shape, or form claim to be an expert on Louisa May Alcott. I never read Little Women until only a few years ago, and she is not even in my top 10 favorite authors. But, I find her life absolutely fascinating and I appreciate how she lived her life, her values, and her determination to succeed.

A couple of years ago, I read just about everything I could get my hands on about LMA and can recommend the following books - I've linked to the blog posts about each book and provided excerpts from those posts to spare you from actually plowing through them looking for nuggets.

Biography

 Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, by Harriet Reisen

I came away from this bio with a renewed admiration for LMA--her courage, her wit, her fortitude, and her talent.  She struggled with identity, but in the end, was able to accomplish what she set out for herself.  Truly a remarkable person.

Marmee and Louisa, by Eve LaPlante 

I really enjoyed the book and felt that LaPlante did a superb job in defending her premise that the relationship between LMA and her mother, Abigail May Alcott, was the most important in her life and was fundamental to her success as a writer. I also thought LaPlante did a good job of putting their lives into historical context, and I learned a lot of social history about the nineteenth century. 

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson

Coming into the book, I knew enough about A. Bronson Alcott to know that I thought he was a selfish crackpot who endangered his family's health and well-being to pursue his experiments in communal living. However, I had no idea what an innocent, well-meaning selfish crackpot he was until I read this book. Like his daughter, Louisa, I ended up forgiving him because his heart was so clearly in the right place, even if his ideas and capabilities fell fall short of the mark.

Civil War Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott 

LMA only served as a nurse for three weeks, but this brief service changed her life profoundly.  Of this time, she said that she was rarely ill before it and never truly well afterwards. She had contracted typhus at the hospital and was treated with a compound containing mercury, which wreaked havoc on her body and most probably shortened her life.  On the other hand, her time as a nurse on her own in a city far from her Concord home during the war broadened her vision and deepened her perspective.

Fiction

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Now that I've finally read Little Women, I was able to read the Little Women chapter in Erin Blakemore's The Heroine's Bookshelf, which explores the trait of ambition and the character Jo. I found Louisa May Alcott's story so sad as compared to the magical world she created in Little Women, but then that is par for the course when it comes to fictional worlds created by beloved authors.

Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan

It didn't occur to me to want to read John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress until last year when I finally read Little Women. The March sisters play-act Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and they attempt to shoulder the burdens life deals them with Christian as their model. Only whilst reading Little Women did I fully realize what an impact The Pilgrim's Progress has had on western literature.

Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

I first read Pickwick Papers roughly 40 years before I read Little Women and have read it several times since then so when the March sisters play Pickwick I actually knew what they were doing and thought it great fun. Reading what LMA clearly loved is another way to understand what made her tick.

March, by Geraldine Brooks 

March is a novel in which the main character is Mr. March, the father of Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March and husband of Marmee, literature's archetypal mother, in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.  

I really think I would've enjoyed March much more if Brooks hadn't leveraged Little Women.  Her main character still could've hailed from Concord, MA, still could've rubbed shoulders with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, still could've been an abolotionist, but needn't have been saddled to Marmee and the girls from Little Women.  There's just too much baggage and it weighs the story down with doubt and assumptions and inevitable dissappointment. 

The Other Alcott, by Elise Hooper 

For some reason I didn't blog about this novel about Mae Alcott, Louisa's youngest sister and the model for Amy in Little Women. I actually really liked it and want to reread it soon. I am one of the few people who actually like and sympathize with Amy and reading about Mae just intensified the belief that LMA really threw her sister under the bus with her Amy. It turns out that Mae was a very talented artist who died young and LMA raised her daughter. I loved reading about the art world in Paris in the latter part of the 19th century.

Other

Little Women - the March family 

Blog post on how the mother/daughters are the heart and soul of this family and how every character is actually part of the family.

Visiting Concord 

Travelogue which includes a visit to the Alcott home, Orchard House, in Concord, MA as well as the cemetary where LMA is buried.

From my 2012 visit to Orchard House

 

Little Women - the March family

I read Little Women in February, counting it for the Back to the Classics challenge category of Family. So let's talk about the March family.

Four sisters surround a loving mother, right?

Jo, Amy, Beth, Meg, and beloved Marmee are the heart of Little Women. But, when you think about it, the entire cast becomes part of the family.

Of course, there is the mostly absent Mr. March, off in Washington D.C. serving as Civil War chaplain and then dangerously ill in the first part and then confined to study and silent pontificating in the second, only surfacing occasionally.

Laurie is surrogate brother to the girls for the entire first half, and is so desperate to really join their fun that he proposes to two of them, and is finally accepted so that he can officially join the family.

There is both a stern matriarch (Aunt March, the feckless Mr March's aunt) and a kindly, gruff  patriarch (Mr. Lawrence) who is a benefactor akin to Cinderella's fairy godmother, supplying feasts and pianos when they are most needed.

John Brooke, Laurie's tutor, marries into the family, but before that fills the role of dependable son, escorting Marmee to Washington when word comes that Mr March is at death's door and becomes her confidant and she his.

Even Professor Bhaer, or Fritz as I like to think of him, is always more brotherly than loverly, which suits Jo's vision of romance just fine.

Now back to the sisters--it's tempting to say that Louisa May Alcott succumbed to stereotypes in her portrayal of Meg (the homebody), Jo (the tomboy), Beth (the saint), and Amy (the flirt), but her own sisters on which the fictional sisters are based provided excellent models. However, in both real life and in the book, all four girls are much more complex than this simple categorization implies.

I love the fact that all four are part of the Pickwick Club, and play their masculine counterparts in the club without reservation. They are literate and artistic and creative, each in their own way, and they are individuals, capable of growth however painful.

It's also interesting the way the sisters pair up--Jo and Beth (opposites in almost every way) and Meg and Amy (with many similar traits but contrasts in terms of spheres--Meg stays home and Amy goes to Europe!). John and Laurie, as brothers-in-law, are also bordering on the stereotype of the older, responsible brother and the younger, frivolous one.

You can view the family and the story as an evolving set of pairs:
Mr and Marmee
Aunt March and Mr Lawrence
Meg and Amy
Jo and Beth
Jo and Laurie (Teddy)
Jo and Aunt March
Aunt March and Amy
Jo and Amy
Mr Lawrence and Beth
Marmee and John
Meg and John
Laurie and John
Laurie and Amy
Jo and Fritz
Marmee and Mr March

Despite all this pairing up, I go back to central notion that Little Women is the story of how Marmee and her girls are the nucleus of a family that they grow and strengthen by grafting strong new stock as needed. The pairing up moves the plot along and provides tension and room for themes to emerge, but the core of this family is not the traditional husband and wife pair, but a mother and her daughters.

But...then...I have to remember that this book was published in 1868, when opportunities for education and careers for women were not what they are today. I talked earlier about how literate and creative and individual the girls were. While they owe much of this to Marmee, Mr March (modeled on LMA's father Bronson Alcott) was a progressive when it came to education of both girls and boys. Much as I think that Bronson Alcott's ego sentenced his family to extreme hardship and poverty, his liberalism made the nucleus that was Marmee and the March girls (i.e., Marmee and the Alcott girls) as strong and vibrant as it was.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

In May, I read Harriet Reisen's excellent biography of Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, and have to say that of the three bios I have read of LMA, I think I enjoyed this one the most.

I began, knowing the story of LMA's life, feeling that old frustration with her father, A. Bronson Alcott.  In the other bios, Eden's Outcasts by John Matteson and Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eve LaPlante, Bronson is really portrayed unsympathetically as someone who simply would not rise up to his familial responsibilities and work to support his family regardless of his personal aspirations to be a thinking man.

Reisen, early in the book, suggests that Bronson suffered from a mental illness that prevented him from acting differently than he did.  I still found him frustrating and gritted my teeth when he scolded LMA for her shortcomings (in his eyes), but I found myself understanding him better and especially understanding better LMA's forgiveness and tenderness towards him as their lives drew to a close  For that alone, I am glad I read this book.

The other thing this bio gave me that the others did not was an appreciation for her other works (i.e., other than Little Women) and a desire to read some of her potboilers.  In fact, I just received a copy of Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, which is an anthology of some of the better sensationalist stories she published.  I've been mulling over what to read for the Back to the Classic challenge in the category of Forgotten Classic, and I think this should fit the bill nicely.

It makes sense that this bio would inspire me to read more of LMA's works as it does set out to tell the story of how Louey. as her mother called her, became a successful and renowned and beloved author.   I enjoyed reading the notes that LMA as an adult wrote in the margins of her own letters and journals and stories from her youth.  We are so lucky that even though she burnt a good deal of her personal writing, she kept much for posterity to study and enjoy.

I came away from this bio with a renewed admiration for LMA--her courage, her wit, her fortitude, and her talent.  She struggled with identity, but in the end, was able to accomplish what she set out for herself.  Truly a remarkable person.

Now I'm eager to watch the documentary, with the same name, that Reisen helped produce and wrote.  It features Jane Alexander as LMA.  Here she is during one of her runs, in which she tries to use up some excess energy.

Marmee and Louisa, Louisa and Laura

For someone who spent the better part of my life avoiding reading Little Women and hence Louisa May Alcott, I seem to have been doing an awful lot of reading about LMA since I finally read LW a year or so ago.

The latest in my reads about LMA is Marmee and Louisa, by Eve LaPlante, a descendant of the Alcotts.  I really enjoyed the book and felt that LaPlante did a superb job in defending her premise that the relationship between LMA and her mother, Abigail May Alcott, was the most important in her life and was fundamental to her success as a writer.  But then, I was a sympathetic reader from the outset.

Even while I was reading Eden's Outcasts, by John Matteson, which is about LMA and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, I felt that LMA and her mother were closer in affection and temperament than she and her father.  Of course, there is no love lost between me and Bronson Alcott, whom I consider one of the most selfish, egotistical, and hypocritical personages of the nineteenth century.  Anyone who compares himself favorably with Jesus and then lets his family starve and beg their relations for rent money doesn't deserve many accolades for his ability to talk...nonstop...about himself.

Marmee and Louisa is by no means a definitive biography, but that's okay.  I like the laser focus on the mother-daughter relationship, how they interacted, depended on each other, and supported each other.

I also thought LaPlante did a good job of putting their lives into historical context, and I learned a lot of social history about the nineteenth century.  For example, she quotes Nancy Theriot (author of Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth Century America: The Biosocial Construction of Feminism): "the late nineteenth-century generation...was 'the least married group of women in United States history, with a record 13 percent remaining single," making the point that LMA was not uncommon in remaining single.  It did cross my mind, however, that many of the men these women might have married were killed in the Civil War, but lack of eligible men doesn't undercut the idea that women who worked for the emancipation of slaves might chafe at remaining in bondage themselves.

Whilst reading about LMA and her mother and how this relationship affected her success as a writer, I also thought about that other towering American author for girls, Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Both LMA and LIW came from a family of girls, both were the second daughters of four girls, with still-born brothers; both grew up in poverty, and went to work to support their families at an early age.  Both wrote fictionalized accounts of their youth, smoothing rough edges and reinventing and reshaping events too painful to even acknowledge decades after they happened.  I can't help but wonder about the impact LMA had on LIW, whether she knew it or not.

I do love reading about authors--what drives them, inspires them, influences them, and shines through them.

Civil War Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott

As part of my Civil War reading, I am trying to mix it up between fiction (contemporary and historical), non-fiction, memoir, war and social issues.  For my last book of 2012, I read Louisa May Alcott's collection of newspapers articles she wrote about her time as a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C. in December 1862 and January 1863. 

LMA only served as a nurse for three weeks, but this brief service changed her life profoundly.  Of this time, she said that she was rarely ill before it and never truly well afterwards. She had contracted typhus at the hospital and was treated with a compound containing mercury, which wreaked havoc on her body and most probably shortened her life.  On the other hand, her time as a nurse on her own in a city far from her Concord home during the war broadened her vision and deepened her perspective.

In typical Victorian lady fashion, LMA assumes the guise of Tribulation Periwinkle who then provides a first-person account of LMA's own experiences--deciding to join the nursing core, traveling alone by train to Washington, living in a boarding house, working in a hospital (she tended the wounded from the battle of Fredericksburg, Dec. 11-15, 1862).  The latter encompasses so much--the men themselves, some old but most heart-breakingly young--she held their hands as they died, read them letters from home, and wrote their final goodbyes, comforted their loved ones--she dressed wounds, assisted surgeons, fed and cleaned and comforted, and then finally fell ill herself. 

At first the persona of Trib grated a bit--basically Jo March on steroids.  Too boisterous, too flip, too hale and hearty, but as LMA went deeper into hospital life, the voice matured and by the end of this short book, only 73 pages, I had come to admire LMA's warm and elegant expressions that transcended pathos.

As a primary source for Civil War nursing, it is exceptional in its realistic but respectful look at the price of war.  As a look at the young woman who "became" Louisa May Alcott, beloved American author, it is priceless--it provides a concentrated view of LMA, reflecting her values (home, hearth, family, compassion, racial equality, gender equality, and duty). 

I liked Little Women just fine, but I must say that I loved this collection of sketches.

Mailbox Monday - Oct 29

I love Mondays because I love Mailbox Monday--it's such fun to bop around the blog-o-sphere and see what everyone else is excited about reading.

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week and explore great book blogs. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.


Visit Mailbox Monday for a list of other bloggers who have posted about their latest acquisitions.

Here's a look at my new books, which fall neatly into the two primary reading fronts I'm currently working on.

Civil War

Love and War, by John Jakes - second book in his North and South trilogy.  I'm also watching the mini-series while I'm reading these bestsellers from the 1980s.  I'm impressed with how accurate the books are and how complete a picture they paint of the Civil War era. 

Civil War Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott.  Here's how the Amazon blurb described this slender book.

Before Little Women brought her wider fame, Alcott achieved recognition for her accounts of her work as a volunteer nurse in an army hospital. Written during the winter of 1862-63, her lively dispatches revealed the desperate realities of battlefield medicine as well as the tentative first steps of women in military service.

I would like to read more first-hand accounts of the war and this seemed like a great way to start, especially given my recent foray into Alcott's life and work.

Venice

Across the River and Into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway - it's been years since I read anything by Hemingway, but I always liked him, back in my high school and college days.  I had to get this book and put it on my Classics Challenge list for 2013 when I discovered it was set in Venice.  Here's part of the Amazon blurb about this book:  

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice,

March and Midnight Rising - fictional and non-fictional Civil War Reading

It just so happened that I read March, by Geraldine Brooks, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz back to back in September.  The coincidence is not so much that they are both books about the Civil War--I am on a CW reading binge--but Brooks and Horwitz are married, and in her Afterword Brooks mentions traveling with her husband countless times to Civil War sites. 

March is a novel in which the main character is Mr. March, the father of Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March and husband of Marmee, literature's archetypal mother, in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.  In LW, Mr. March is a shadowy character, off stage during half the book and in his study or in the far background during the second half.  He rarely speaks, and while the girls adore him, he withers as a character in the face of the force which is Marmee.

As with A Year of Wonders, the other novel by Brooks that I've read, I had mixed feelings about this book, which is why it's taken me so long to blog about it.  It is well-written and the characters and storyline are interesting, just not believeable.  I'm not sure what it is about Brooks' stories, but she always seems to go a step too far in her plotting, rendering me a disbeliever. 

I also came to this book having recently read Eden's Outcasts, which is about Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  Brooks' portrait of Mr. March draws heavily on Bronson Alcott, just as LMA drew heavily on her own life for the stories and characters of Little Women.  While I am not a fan of Bronson Alcott, I'm even less of a fan of Mr. March.  Brooks took all his worst qualities and magnified them...and yet, the writing is good.

I really think I would've enjoyed March much more if Brooks hadn't leveraged Little Women.  Her main character still could've hailed from Concord, MA, still could've rubbed shoulders with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, still could've been an abolotionist, but needn't have been saddled to Marmee and the girls from Little Women.  There's just too much baggage and it weighs the story down with doubt and assumptions and inevitable dissappointment.

On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Midnight Rising, a bio of John Brown, he whose "body llies a-mouldering in the grave" while "his soul's marching on."  I have known of Harper's Ferry for years, but never really had a good grounding in what led Brown and his family and followers to attack Harper's Ferry, what they hoped to accomplish, or even really what they did accomplish.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book, and really loved how Horwitz was able to link so many of the major players in the Civil War together via Brown's story.  Absolutely first rate history and one that will bear rereading down the road.

Here's a great interview with Tony Horwitz about Midnight Rising on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Visiting Concord

Last week a business trip took me to Boston so I seized the opportunity and asked my husband to go out with me a few days early for a little sightseeing.

Number 1 item on my agenda was to visit Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott in Concord, so we started out by staying our first night in Lexington, at one of Starwood's new eco-conscious Element hotels.  Given that we're not big fans of the whole B&B experience, staying in Concord didn't seem reasonable but we enjoyed this hotel and I would recommend it.  I can also recommend the two places we ate in Concord--80 Thoreau was wonderful (started with the Pork & Rabbit Terrine and then I had skate for the first time--wonderfully light, but buttery and full of flavor) and then for lunch we ate (with I think the whole town) at Concord's Colonial Inn, where I had a lobster roll, which was also a first.

I truly enjoyed visiting Orchard House and grooving on all the Little Women stuff--btw, the tour guide did an excellent job, especially in describing transcendentalism.  She also was diplomatic when it came to Bronson Alcott--I don't have much respect for the man myself, but she was factual in answering questions about him without going into all the aspects of his character that kept his family at poverty's door until Louisa published Little Women.  I only read Little Women last year, so this wasn't so much a pilgrimage for me as an interesting place to visit.  If you want to read up on LMA, Eden's Outcasts about Louisa and her father, Bronson, is excellent.

At Orchard House, Concord, MA

While Orchard House was fun, interesting, and special, I had expected to enjoy it...however, I was pleasantly surprised twice when we visited the Concord Museum.  I absolutely loved peeking into Emerson's library...

Often what makes a vacation memorable is when you stumble onto something wonderful that you didn't expect.  For Jeff and I, that was the Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage exhibit that is at the museum until September 23.  We loved it so much we bought the last signed copy of the book that Leibovitz wrote to accompany the exhibit. 

After the museum and Orchard House, we visited Sleepy Hollow Cemetary and found the graves, it wasn't hard, of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathanial Hawthorne. My favorite part of the cemetary, and really may favorite part of Concord, was the peacefulness of the woods, and fields. The area has changed so much in the 150 years since these giants of American letters lived and worked here, but you can definitely feel the pull of Nature on your soul when you visit the area.

Next up was the Minuteman National Park where we visited the Old North Bridge, where the first battle of the American Revolution was fought.  As to be expected in the summer, the bridge was crowded with visitors to the point where we really couldn't get a picture of the bridge without someone on it.  No matter, my favorite part was the utter tranquility of the scene looking downriver from the bridge.  It didn't take me long to imagine away everyone else and think how lovely it would be to spend the summer reading in this spot.

Our final stop in Concord was to Walden Pond, which is now a state park and was overrun with kids playing in the water. They did have a recreation of Thoreau's cabin near the parking lot, with his statue. I'd heard that Walden Pond was no longer a place where one could quietly retreat from the world, so I wasn't too disappointed.



Eden's Outcasts - a companion book to Little Women

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, was every bit as good as I hoped and expected. Coming into the book, I knew enough about A. Bronson Alcott to know that I thought he was a selfish crackpot who endangered his family's health and well-being to pursue his experiments in communal living. However, I had no idea what an innocent, well-meaning selfish crackpot he was until I read this book. Like his daughter, Louisa, I ended up forgiving him because his heart was so clearly in the right place, even if his ideas and capabilities fell fall short of the mark.

The most fascinating fact about Louisa and Bronson that I learned from the book was how coincidental their lives and achievements were. Not only were they born on the same day of the same month, November 29, but their greatest literary milestones were passed in the same year (Little Women for LMA and Tablets for her father), and they died within two days of each other. While LMA's literary success and fame far outstripped her father's, their arcs were remarkably parallel.

I found the book a delight to read--well-written, well-annotated and researched, and just the right amount of quotation from letters, journals (both father and daughter were lifelong diarists), and other primary sources. While I enjoyed reading about Bronson's quixotic youth and early struggles to find his place in Transcendental society, I most enjoyed reading about LMA's growth and development as a writer.

Having finally read Little Women last year, I can honestly say that reading this bio of LMA and her father, who was such a strong force in her life, has greatly enriched LW for me. Just today when I was listening to an audio recording of P.D. James' book, Talking About Detective Fiction, she says that "most fiction is autobiographical and some autobiography partly fiction." With the possible exception of the Little House series, I can't think of a better example of what James is saying than LMA and Little Women, which is an unabashed fictionalized account of her life.

Other notable highlights of Eden's Outcasts include a fascinating look at the years leading up to the Civil War and the abolition movement (John Brown's widow and daughters visited the Alcotts after his death) and the part the whole family played in this monumental struggle, not to mention LMA's relationships to the Concord greats, Emerson and Thoreau (who were mentors and teachers) and Hawthorne, who was a somewhat cranky and reclusive neighbor. I am now eager to get to Concord to visit Orchard House, Hillside Chapel, and Sleepy Hollow cemetary.

Having recently finished The Pilgrim's Progress, which was such a primary influence in Bronson's life, and hence his daughter's, I feel like I've completed a mini-course on LMA. Reading Pilgrim's Progess helped me see how Bronson could justify his single-minded passion of pursuing his Eden, just as Christian in Pilgrim's Progress throws off his family responsibilities in order to journey to the Celestial City, leaving his wife and children to journey on their own, just as Bronson's wife and daughters do. I can't say I ever come to admire Bronson Alcott, but I certainly admire his daughter and what she was able to acheive.

I'm not sure I'm such a fan of LMA's writing that I want to tackle her other works, but I found Eden's Outcasts to be an essential companion book to Little Women, which I read because of its popularity over the past 144 years (as in, "what's all the fuss?"), and reading both have enabled me to appreciate and understand the contribution of Little Women to American literature.

Little Women

Somehow I never read Little Women as a child and so entered my teen years determined to scorn it for its notorious goody-goody nature. And so the years went by with my scorn for this classic unchecked until recently when I felt the need to experience for myself the world that so many have loved to distraction. I started Little Women as an experiment with the Kindle app on my iphone, reading it whilst waiting at the doctor's office, the hair salon, etc. but soon found myself so caught up in the world of Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth that I pulled the Penguin Classics version that I won last year down from the shelf and read it for real.

While the goody-goody nature of the book is often cloying, I think the reason for the novel's popularity and longevity lies in the fact that Louisa May Alcott created such a completely intact world that was realistic enough to be inhabitable but whose sharp edges were softened and made comfortable and thoroughly desirable. I have no doubt that if I had read this book as a child, I would have "played" Little Women, fantasized about living within the pages of the novel, become obsessed with it as I did my Anne and Little House books.

Last week on a business trip, I downloaded the 1994 Little Women movie with Winona Ryder as Jo and Susan Sarandon as Marmee. I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt that it captured the spirit of the book as well as all the major plot points, not an easy thing to do with a highly episodic book like this one. I also like how the script incorporated a bit of the Transcentalism that shaped the Alcott household but that is not overtly present in the book itself.

Now that I've finally read Little Women, I was able to read the Little Women chapter in Erin Blakemore's The Heroine's Bookshelf, which explores the trait of ambition and the character Jo. I found Louisa May Alcott's story so sad as compared to the magical world she created in Little Women, but then that is par for the course when it comes to fictional worlds created by beloved authors.

What did I earmark? I didn't want to fold down the corners of the pages of my beautiful copy, so I didn't mark much, but after reading this passage I found a post-it note to mark the page because I thought it so good. Regardless of her motivation as a writer and views of the finished product, Alcott was a talented author, able to balance the pressures of telling a story with speaking out with a strong narrative voice.

..in spite of her [Amy's] American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us,--that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old,--like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled.

Ultimately, for me, passages like this are what makes Little Women a classic. Yes, the story of the March girls growing up, shouldering their responsibilities and embracing their roles in society, is inspiring and heart-warming, but LMA's ability to articulate the American experience in all its social contradictions and ambiguity earns Little Women a place on the Classics shelf and reading lists for the future.