I don’t know how old I was when I first read Little Women. But I do remember that when I changed schools in fourth grade, I made my first friends there on the basis of our shared passion for the March sisters. It was as if my new friends and I already had old friends in common: Meg, the kindly, conventional elder sister; Beth, whose death we had wept over; the flirtatious, status-conscious Amy, about whom we harbored a range of mixed feelings; and Jo, the one we wanted to be, the one we felt we were.
By then, Louisa May Alcott had already given me a whole series of firsts: Little Women was the first book I compulsively reread; Beth’s the first loss I mourned; Jo the first literary character I identified with. And as I returned to my favorite sections—that is, the parts about love and death—Little Women was the first book that moved me in the ways in which we hope to be moved by books, and in which writers (as I now know) hope to move their readers.
When the Library of America reissued Little Women in 2005, together with its sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, it seemed to me the perfect moment to revisit this classic that I hadn’t read for what, astonishingly, had been almost fifty years.
As someone who routinely blanks on my own phone number, I was stunned by how much of the book I remember, the major and minor incidents that have lodged in my mind: old Mr. Laurence’s gift of the piano to Beth, the newspaper the girls publish, the way Aunt March settles the question of Meg’s marriage by opposing it. Reading these sections, I have an eerie sensation, a bit like déjà vu, like getting in touch with a former, lost self. At the time—and maybe this has something to do with the way children read—I somehow never fully comprehended the fact that it was fiction; it was almost as if I imagined that these girls were real people. Now, more aware of the writer’s presence, I’m surprised by how much Alcott seems to have disliked Amy, by the vanity and pretentiousness that she never fails to point out, and that suffuses the maddeningly self-involved letters Amy writes to her stay-at-home sisters from Europe.
But what surprises me most is how daring and subversive the book is in its view of the satisfactions and frustrations of being a woman, little or otherwise. If my generation claimed our right to enter the workplace and succeed there, if we believed that we were just as intelligent, ambitious, and independent as men, perhaps it’s because so many of us grew up with the example of the Marches.
In the early chapters, the girls and their mother are shown living without male help or support, somewhat impoverished and understandably worried about Father in the army, but doing reasonably well on their own. Indeed, their household—headed by the endlessly understanding, tirelessly compassionate, all-knowing Marmee—seems like a nonstop pajama party. And what are her daughters doing when we first meet them? They’re complaining! None of them quite seems like the model of passive, stoic nineteenth-century womanhood as they bemoan Father’s absence and the privations they must endure, as Meg complains about her teaching job, Beth about the housework, Amy about school, and Jo about the trials of working for Aunt March.
From this distance, it seems clearer than ever why my friends and I so admired Jo. She’s smart, brave, honest, gifted, generous, a reader and a writer, and, even more important, a born rebel and resister. If the March daughters were the Beatles, Jo would be John Lennon. A chapter is devoted to her discovery of her skills—and her integrity—as an author. She’s Peter Pan without Neverland, reluctant to grow up and to see her family divided by adulthood and marriage, unwilling to submit to the pressures that the world around her exerts on young women: the pressure to conform, to submerge her identity, her desires and ideals, to trade her dreams of being a writer for a happy home life. Married and the mother of twins, Meg has already provided an example of the perils of underfunded domesticity. We shudder to imagine what might have happened to Meg’s marriage had she not heeded Marmee’s wise counsel, which could have come straight from any modern advice column: “You have only made the mistake that most young wives make,—forgotten your duty to your husband in your love for your children. A very natural and forgivable mistake, Meg, but one that had better be remedied before you take to different ways.”
Meg’s situation is hardly what Jo envisions for herself, yet neither is Jo resigned to being what she calls a “literary spinster.” Like her twentieth-century counterparts, she wants it all: home and work. It’s why she refuses Laurie, the handsome boy we all had crushes on and thought she should have married, the rich boy whom the more frivolous Amy not only loves but sees as the answer to her family’s problems. “One of us must marry well,” Amy writes to her sisters. “Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t, yet,—so I shall, and make everything cosy all round.” And Laurie, for his part, is quite ready to exchange Jo’s high-mindedness for Amy’s high style.
Ultimately, “after her many and vehement declarations of independence,” Jo accepts Professor Bhaer, who not only exhibits many of her own best qualities—modesty, intelligence, sympathy, integrity—but shares her love for Shakespeare, teaches her German, and has a similar sense of purpose and mission. When Aunt March dies and leaves Plumfield to Jo, she and the Professor turn it into “a happy, home-like place for boys who needed teaching, care, and kindness.” It’s an ideal marriage for Jo, though you can’t help feeling that neither Meg nor Amy would have been quite so delighted with the earnest, cerebral—and considerably older—Professor.
By the time the book ends, and Marmee has bestowed her final blessing on the proceedings (“Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I can never wish you a greater happiness than this!”), we have learned a great deal about the world—and how to live in it. A world in which we get the mate we want or need—or deserve. A world in which the hard lessons and rewards may not be what we imagine. And a world in which all of us—women in particular—must insist on our right to happiness, independence, and fulfillment. While my friends and I were reading about a family of little women, Louisa May Alcott was helping us to grow up into braver and larger human beings.