Every time this flick comes on, I wonder if the sisters hastened the youngest one’s death by assuming she was going to die. Didn’t anybody ever recover from whatever fever she had? A little positive thinking might have gone a long way.
At least in the book, she survived the fever, but it had damaged her heart.
Or it might not have. It used to be much more common for children to die than it is now, because things we can now easily cure used to be very often fatal.
Positive thinking can only do so much. It wasn’t as if they stopped caring for her.
So Rachel lied‽
Next you’ll tell me the last line of the book isn’t “And they realized they were no longer little girls. They were little women.”
There, there, Moe.
Shit, stupid memory- didn’t an illiterate Hoss Cartwright ask for “The Good Book”, and somebody sold him Little Women?
Louisa May Alcott based the book on her own family, which was at least as interesting as the book characters. “Beth” was based on her sister Elizabeth, who was shy (unlike the rest of the family) and was probably rather ignored than doted upon. As per the story, she contracted scarlet fever and never really recovered, dying at 22.
The wealthy benefactress Aunt March of the novel was imaginary – the Alcotts were impoverished by improvidence of Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist and utopianist. But Louisa herself proved to be the Aunt March, as the success of her books enabled her to support her mother, her widowed sister May (Meg in the book), and send Amy to Europe to learn art (where she married wealthy, and died two months after the birth of her first child).
Little Women remains a good read, although somewhat sentimental and moralistic, as it was written in 1868, for girls. Alcott herself was a heroine.
nevermind
Scarlet fever can damage the kidneys and heart. There were no antibiotics then. There was so much disease then, especially in crowded poor tenements (which is where Beth contracted the disease, tending to a sick family). At least she didn’t have consumption (TB).
My great grandmother had scarlet fever while pregnant. She had twins, two boys, one of which seemed fine and healthy, and one, my great uncle George, who was described as looking like a red and wrinkled prune. The other boy died the day after he was born, George lived to old age. He and a younger sister, my maternal grandmother, were the only two of six kids to live long enough to see their grandchildren.
Wellll, Beth did die, but not from the fever itself. She died from from the heart issues caused from the fever.
My sister read me this book the first time, we sobbed through the sad parts. I’ve read it a few times, though not in decades. I cry every damn time.