“November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” said Meg, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.
“That’s the reason I was born in it,” observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.
— Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott was born on this day in 1832.
First of all, my recent essay on Tomboy Films is relevant. Jo March, of course, comes up.
Little Women is a book I go back to again and again. I am an adult now, long past my 12-year-old self who first read it, but I still maintain that:
— Jo and Laurie should have been together or …
— Jo should have remained single. The Professor is an unwelcome intrusion.
— Amy’s burning of Jo’s book was an appalling action and Jo being forced to forgive her was riDICULOUS.
Nevertheless: the book remains, a detailed and human portrait of four diverse sisters, and their mother, coping with the world while the Patriarch was away fighting in the Civil War. The family is poor (as the Alcotts were, until Louisa’s books hit the shelves – they were poor because their wacko father, Bronson Alcott, put the family into a state of deprivation due to his harebrained schemes). The March family all love one another and look out for one another. The sequence of Beth’s first illness, and Jo and Laurie’s all-night vigil, brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it.
Alcott grew up in Concord (I highly recommend a pilgrimage to the Alcott home). She was one of 4 girls, part of what we would now call an activist family. Her parents were abolitinists and social reformers. Her mother was a social worker. Her father was an educational philosopher whose ideas were sometimes sound, and sometimes crazy. He believed in communal living (Louisa May wrote some funny pieces about having to submit to her father’s experiments as a young girl.) Bronson Alcott (also born on this day) was buddies with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and heavily involved in the Transcendentalist movement. At the time, her father’s views on teaching were very controversial (he thought learning should be fun, that girls should be educated, that classrooms should be beautiful). He poured his heart (and the family finances) into a school which went under after a couple of years, putting the family at financial risk. Louisa May Alcott eventually, many years later, would be the sole supporter of her parents. She made a ton of money during her lifetime, quite rare for a writer.
In 1862, Alcott (determined to contribute financially to her family) traveled to Washington D.C. as a Civil War nurse. By this point, Alcott had already started getting stuff published – poems, short stories in the Gothic melodramatic vein. She actually preferred Gothic melodramas to the kinds of books that later would make her famous. (She didn’t think much of Little Women and found the writing of it extremely tedious.) Her experience as a nurse in the Civil War prompted her to publish a wonderful book called Hospital Sketches. At that point, her publisher asked her if she would write a book “for girls”. Never one to back off from a challenge, Louisa May Alcott sat down and wrote Little Women in two months, an extraordinary feat. She grew up with 3 sisters; she put her entire childhood and life into that book. She didn’t think the book would amount to much.
Little Women was published in 1868 and was an immediate runaway success. Within only a couple of weeks, the publisher begged Alcott to get to work on a sequel. Alcott did. It was another smash success. Louisa May Alcott had become a star.
Every book she wrote after that was eagerly awaited for by a breathless loving public. Success had, indeed, come – her childish ambitions to be ‘rich and famous’ came to fruition tenfold … but ‘happy’? Was she happy?
She never married. She took care of her sister May’s daughter after May died from complications in childbirth. Being a surrogate mother to this child was one of the most fulfilling experiences of Alcott’s life. She kept writing, kept publishing … although she began to get ill from mercury poisoning she received years earlier during the Civil War. Like many other Civil War nurses, she contracted typhoid fever, and at the time the proscribed cure was something called calomel – a drug laden with mercury.
Near the end of her life, Alcott became active in the suffragette movement. In 1879, she was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, for the school committee election.
Her beloved and eccentric father died on March 4, 1888. Louisa May Alcott died two days later.
Alcott didn’t care for the book that made her name and probably would have wished her legacy was different … but it is not for the artist to decide what an audience will love, love so much they pass the book on to their children, their grandchildren.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, and even more astounding, that she wrote such a book for hire. She always was the most practical member of the family.
When she was 15 years old, Alcott wrote in her journal:
“I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!”
I love Little Women and Little Men and Jo’s Boys. I love the movie, particularly the ones with Katherine Hepburn and Winona Ryder as Jo. Marvelous. Don’t like the June Allyson version at all. I absolutely detest Amy, mourn Beth and admire Meg. I fantasize that that Amy dies in childbirth, the Professor also dies (because he is so much older than Jo) and Jo and Laurie finally get together to raise Amy’s beautiful blond child, because Jo never has any children of her own which is why she starts the school for boys. Too much? Oh, well.
// I fantasize that that Amy dies in childbirth, the Professor also dies (because he is so much older than Jo) and Jo and Laurie finally get together to raise Amy’s beautiful blond child, because Jo never has any children of her own which is why she starts the school for boys. //
Ha! I really love this alternate universe!! I am with you on all of this.
I’m with you on the movie versions too. The Winona one grew on me (and Claire Danes, in particular, is heartbreaking as Beth) – and the Hepburn one is the best. My good pal wrote an essay about the Hepburn film (and the adaptation):
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1133-classic-hollywood-_little-women_-captures-the-storys-appeal-for-all-time
My favorite photo of her is the one at the bottom of the post. Says it all. No words needed.
I’m probably the only person in the world who was glad that Jo and Laurie didn’t get together – as a child and teen, I was so hungry for stories where girls and boys (or women and men) were allowed to just be friends. This in spite of the fact that I loved (and still love) romance, and would have been devastated if Anne (of Green Gables) and Gilbert had never married…
Kirinleaf –
// I was so hungry for stories where girls and boys (or women and men) were allowed to just be friends //
I really like this perspective. And I agree with it.
Sheila
I still remember that thrill of recognition I felt as a kid upon reading that quote, “November is the most disagreeable month…..” Because I too was born in November!
I so wanted to be Jo (or Katherine Hepburn) but was far too shy. Possibly my first desire to be an actress and be someone else. Also, I knew, somewhere inside, I might have been shy but not good like Beth and really like Jo, even though it didn’t show.
I had a picture book which only intensified my horror that Jo went with that fat, old professor.
And Amy marrying Laurie was also a great disappointment.
I didn’t mind the Winona version, who doesn’t really fit Jo but the professor was Gabriel Byrne, far better looking and more interesting I thought then Christian Bale anyway.
Amazing how Katherine Hepburn so perfectly fit that role. Her history and family too, so similar to Alcott.
Now I want to read this again, I still have that picture book, which will probably crumble in my hands if I tried to read from that one!
Regina –
// Possibly my first desire to be an actress and be someone else. //
Interesting! I had a similar experience when I was a kid. I was so IN the story it was almost an out of body experience.
// I had a picture book which only intensified my horror that Jo went with that fat, old professor //
Ha. Oh man. Like, why Jo, why?
I read and reread Little Woman so many times! I also loved Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Later, I found and liked Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom and enjoyed them, but not as much as the ones about the March sisters. My parents didn’t let us have a TV, thus I read a LOT, but my own children have TV, Netflix, the internet, etc. so they don’t read as much I wished they would. I’m sad that I haven’t been able to pass on my enjoyment of some of these iconic books of my childhood to my own children.
// I’m sad that I haven’t been able to pass on my enjoyment of some of these iconic books of my childhood to my own children. //
I’m wondering if younger generations still thrill to Little Women? Or is it too old-fashioned? I just learned that a mini-series is coming – with our beloved Claire Novak (Kathryn Newton) as Amy – which I already find very intriguing. Maybe this new version (and I love that it’s going to be a mini-series – maybe it can get into more depth with all the different episodes) will introduce the book to a new generation.
I’m just waiting for someone at PBS or Netflix or something to wise up and make a TV series that can include all of the little side stories that never make it into the film versions. TV producers of America–take advantage of how inherently serialized this enduringly popular book is!
My favorite obscure chapters that (as far as I know) haven’t made it on film were 1) the newspaper (with all of their articles written in their own voices–Beth’s is just a thinly disguised recipe, bless her), (admittedly that…is not prime material for dramatization), 2) that weird bit where Amy gets a table at the church fair (?) and the snobby rich girl steals Amy’s artsy goods but Amy ends up winning everyone over with her amazing decorating skills and 3) the trip to the island with Laurie’s British friends (cousins?) where the Brits are subtly condescending and Jo wears a big hat and they play a VERY aggressive game of croquet and the Brits cheat and STILL lose, and then they sit around on blankets and do the riddles and the story chain!!! I love the story chain and how each person’s contribution is so emblematic of who they are and they all use it to send secret, subtextual messages to each other. (Honestly, the fact that this one has never made it onscreen irks me the most–it’s dying to be filmed! Never mind that it has no direct relevance to the rest of the plot… again: TV series!)
Also, the part where the girls don’t do their chores for a week and by the end they’re all crabby and miserable and Beth’s little bird Pip dies because she forgets to feed him and she is guilt-ridden impressed itself very deeply onto my youthful psyche. The depiction of the importance of Puritanical work ethics struck a note on a deep-set string in my soul, and now whenever I take more than a day or two to relax, I remember how Jo got sick from eating too many apples and a headache from reading too much…
Absolutely. I think it would make a fabulous series. Sort of like “Anne of Green Gables”. It would have to be on PBS though. Not enough sex and drugs for cable.
// I’m just waiting for someone at PBS or Netflix or something to wise up and make a TV series that can include all of the little side stories that never make it into the film versions. //
It’s coming! I was just looking up an actress on IMDB and learned she’s playing Amy in an upcoming mini-series. I haven’t heard much else about it though.
// then they sit around on blankets and do the riddles and the story chain!!! I love the story chain and how each person’s contribution is so emblematic of who they are and they all use it to send secret, subtextual messages to each other. //
I LOVE that whole episode!!
//Amy’s burning of Jo’s book was an appalling action and Jo being forced to forgive her was riDICULOUS.//
YES. I am very much a grudge holder, and that was an unforgivable act.
Completely unforgivable. I mean, Amy doesn’t deserve to die when she falls beneath the ice, of course, but STILL.
Sheila
Did you see Greta Gerwig’s Little Women yet? I enjoyed it, as I do all the film versions, but it was Amy that captivated me. Greta’s take on Amy was a revelation, different and it made so much sense! And the actress Florence Pugh, who I have never heard of is so good!
Greta Gerwig is of course a Jo! I just saw Lady Bird too and it knocked me out. What a great original talent for one so young.
Merry Christmas dear Sheila and may 2020 be a bright one for ya!
Regina – yes, I did see it – and I totally agree with you in re: Amy. It did make so much sense – and Pugh did an amazing job (stole the film from Jo, imo). I was so surprised by this aspect of it – because Amy is such a notorious figure – she burned Jo’s book!! bah! – but I really loved how the film re-thought her.
In general, I really loved it – although Hepburn is still my favorite Jo.
Happy 2020 to you too Regina!
When I originally read the book, yes, I wanted Laurie & Jo together. But now, after so many years, I feel that if Jo was ever going to marry, it would be to an older man. I see her now as a daddy’s girl, despite her closeness to Marmee and her father being away for much of the story. She wanted a man with some moral weight to him. That’s not Laurie! If I remember correctly, the text doesn’t portray him as that old, regardless of the work of the illustrator. I interpret him as maybe 10-15 years older. After all, they have 2 sons in the later books and he’s still hale & hearty at the end of Jo’s Boys.
Also, Amy displays the most moral growth in the course of the story.