Little Women: The Original Classic Novel Featuring Photos from the Film!

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In fact, in the book, he was even angry at himself for moving on so fast and reproached himself for his fickleness (It seems that Alcott knew exactly how hard it would be for the audience to believe his turn of character, so why did she do this to us?

flagged a long paragraph that revealed their ages and dispositions, and then I barely referred to it. No detail was too minute: “I printed a galley version of Little Women and made a custom case for the galley sheets. I wanted a better explanation of what Beth dies of and came across this blog post (and I think authorial intent is as good as any).I’ve recently attended a lecture on serialization in which the professor stated and that due the effects of serialization on the novel during the nineteenth century the author was becoming a slave to their text (through having to conform to a certain format of writing, having to chop and change their work to fit the serial format as well as having to alter the ending or progression of the novel due to the demands of the readers. Boy, maybe I’m just naiive, but I find it disgusting to try to project such terminology on a good old, wholesome (I thought! The sequels, Little Men and particularly Jo’s Boys (I’ll get to those in a later review) have a bit more of a social conscience than Little Women, but it’s addressed much more towards the early stirrings of feminism than towards racial issues. Now that’s the sort of thing you would say about the man you love, esteem and admire the most, surely – and that was the point where I really felt the stab of Laurie’s not chasing Jo, and winning her, in the end.

The same, I would argue, cannot be said for the book’s most egregious and commonly-cited problem, i. March safely at home, busy with his books and the small parish which found in him a minister by nature as by grace. Even though Alcott tried her best to make the Laurie/Amy pairing make sense, the whole time, it just made me go, oh I cannot believe you Teddy, how could you.That may be so, and I’m the last one to denigrate writing as a way of working through your own little issues, but I think what she’s trying to do here on a real-life level counteracts what she did perhaps too successfully on a narrative level.

In real life, Marmee and Jo may be quite right: Jo and Laurie might make a terrible couple, each too stubborn to compromise, and Laurie might be much better suited to Amy.

It’s dumb, I know, to criticize a classic book on the basis of what it doesn’t contain, but I still think if the Alcott family’s abolitionism had been a more obvious part of the March family, it would have been more interesting. HAVE SMALL END CHIPS, SOME SCUFF SPINE EDGES, Four full page illustrations present, including Frontispiece.

It’s as if Alcott created two characters who were destined to be together, decided to keep them apart, but could never quite separate them, despite her own sternest good intentions. I think the discontent readers often feel with the ending stems from the fact that Alcott set up expectations of romance in the first volume of the book, then imposed a realistic ending in the second.If you’ll be reading Little Women for the first time or revisiting it, I do recommend Anne Boyd Rioux’s book. I’ve heard speculation that Alcott based the Jo-Laurie relationship a bit on one of her own unsuccessful romances (unlike Jo, she never married) and that by having Jo reject Laurie, Louisa May was taking back the control and agency she wished she’d had in that relationship.