This thread is for readers Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Let’s discuss the books, the characters and LMA.
I’ll start - are you still peeved with LMA for not letting Jo marry Laurie?
I am. She married him to Amy? Amy? When I was ten and reading LW for the first time, I’d never heard the phrase “What the fuck?” but if I’d known it I’d have used it when Laurie got hitched to that popinjay. Why do you suppose LMA did that?
Now see, I thought Jo was right. She knew that they were much better as friends than lovers. They would have fought too much! I always thought she made sense in refusing him, no matter how hard it was. I did think it was a little too “easy-way-out” when he married Amy. Gotta have the happy ending of him marrying a March girl!
What I’d like to know is how many of you skip the Pickwick Paper when you do a reread? I know I always do!
I skip the pickwick Paper, and I think Jo absolutely should not have married Laurie. Mr. Bhaer was the man for her.
Little Women is one of my all-time favorite books.
I felt it was good that these two initially shallow people matured and ended up together. But then, I read Little Men before I read Little Women, so I had already seen Amy and Laurie as mature adults and parents of a fragile child, and Jo as the wife of Professor Bhaer.
I read two passages from Little Women at my sister’s wedding. One was Marmee’s comment to Meg after she goes to “Vanity Fair”: “To be loved …by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman, and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beautiful experience.”
The other was this:
“Jo never, never would learn to be proper, for when he said that as they stood upon the steps, she just put both hands into his, whispering tenderly, Not empty now, and stooping down, kissed her Friedrich under the umbrella. It was dreadful, but she would have done it if the flock of draggle-tailed sparrows on the hedge had been human beings, for she was very far gone indeed, and quite regardless of everything but her own happiness. Though it came in such a very simple guise, that was the crowning moment of both their lives, when, turning from the night and storm and loneliness to the household light and warmth and peace waiting to receive them, with a glad Welcome home! Jo led her lover in, and shut the door.”
I was so choked up I could barely get through it.
I read Little Women back in middle school. I remember being really mad when Amy’s teacher hit her on the hands for eating pickled limes in class. (Or was it lemons? I don’t remember exactly.) Also, Jo was my favorite of the four, because she was a bookworm like me, and I wished I was as brave as she was, and still do.
IMO, the chapters featuring Meg’s domestic life with John were pretty useless.
I half-agree, but it also makes sense to me that Amy and Laurie’s bond would mature as they experienced grieving Beth together in Europe. Amy was essentially stranded there with no connection to her home but Laurie. The trauma of losing Beth would have been the defining moment of her coming of age, the thing that pushed her from girlhood to womanhood. Laurie, who had newly come into his own independence, was in an ideal position to comfort and advise her. The fact that they were “alone together”, isolated in Europe but from the same home soil, would have pushed them even closer to one another.
I think that if I were in that situation, I would be ripe for falling in love as well.
I thought they were sweet, and showed her maturing as well. She was a bit of a social climber, as evidenced by her fortnight away at “debutante camp” and her envy at how the family of the children she taught lived. I loved the part where she modeled John’s new heavy coat for him and asked how he liked her new gown.
What did Beth die of? I know she never fully recovered from scarlet fever…do we assume it was a weakened heart or cancer?
Put me in the “Amy and Laurie” camp. Jo and Laurie were better friends.
I liked the Pickwick Papers.
I always assumed she died of a weakened heart. The description of her becoming so tired she can no longer even sew kind of fits that.
What the hell* is *a pickled lime, anyway?
I’m assuming some kind of candied fruit.
Somehow, despite being a complete bookworm my entire life, I got to age 48 before I read the entire Little Women book. Oh, I knew the storyline and had read excerpts in textbooks, but never sat down and read it cover to cover. Never even went and saw the last movie, though I know I saw parts of the earlier one. But a group from my church was going to see the stage production last year, so I grabbed my daughter’s copy of the book and read it. While I didn’t care for the musical production, I liked the book. While I really felt sad that Jo rejected Laurie, I felt it was for the best. And Amy matured quite a bit in Europe, and she really needed a rich man to keep her happy. Jo just needed a father.
freckafree, those are indeed beautiful passages! What a lovely and inspired idea to read them at a wedding. I truly wish I’d thought of it. I married a German and the closest I got to your idea was to muse briefly as he and I stood before the officiant, “I wonder if this how Jo felt when she married Professor Bhaer?”
Dopers, a number of feminist scholars these days think that LMA was a deeply closeted lesbian. Do you you think that the depth of feeling in the two passages that freckafree quotes refutes this theory?
No, the fact that it’s a theory advanced by “feminist scholars” does that already. 
Not to mention that it falls into the pattern of the frequently-refuted “OMG! So-and-so is teh ghey!”
In terms of plot and character development, I understand why LMA put Amy and Laurie together, but emotionally I’m still shocked and horrified that it wasn’t Laurie and Jo. I’m sure it didn’t help that the first time I read LW, I was young enough that the Professor seemed like a “random old guy,” making it all the more perplexing when Jo fell for him. And I even like Amy.
I was shocked and bummed at Jo’s refusal all those years ago when I first read LW.
But I can see how it works. (I’ve since read the book a zillion times.)
Laurie really wanted to be a part of the March family, Amy wanted to be comfortable, and yeah, Prof Bhaer was a bit of a father figure and a patient soul for the tempestuous Jo.
When I was younger, the domestic Meg bored me, but when I got older, I liked those parts.
Every now and then I skip the Pickwick Papers, but I’ve noticed that when I do bother to read them, I like 'em.
freckafree: Lovely passages, lovely thought to use them.
I forgot to mention it is one of my favorite books, too.
I remember that when I first read Little Women as a little girl, I had skimmed ahead to a part in which Laurie and Amy are together in Paris and Laurie is thinking about life without Jo, and I was confused – had Jo died? And when I flipped to the back and saw that Jo was still alive, I was seriously confused. Why was Laurie not with Jo?? What the heck?!
And then when I got to the part where Jo refused Laurie, I bawled. I’m talking full-on vocal sobbing. The line that killed me was when he starts stalking off and Jo asks him where he’s going and he answers, “To the Devil!” Oh, God, my little heart was wrung dry.
And then he marries Amy?! WTF, LMA, WTF? Thank God for my imagination, where I could enact Jo and Laurie’s reconciliation and marriage and happy family life. And Amy’s death.
I still read Little Men and Jo’s Boys, though (and An Old-Fashioned Girl, which I also liked). IIRC, there’s a scene in one of the sequels (Little Men, I think) where Laurie comes to visit Jo and watches her napping on a couch, and then she wakes up and sees him and calls him “Teddy,” which makes him smile ruefully, as Amy calls him “My Lord” – am I remembering this correctly? I do remember seizing on this scene as proof that Amy was a worthless ass and Laurie still loved Jo. Ah, one could dream.
Have any of you read LMA’s A Long Fatal Love Chase? I started it a little while ago, but it read like bad fanfiction so I gave it up. It was fun to read out loud, though.
I think Amy calls Laurie “My Lord”, and Laurie calls her, “Mrs. Laurence”. Yep, he does. Near the end of Good Wives.
After mature reflection, I have decided that I think Amy is better for Laurie than Jo. So I’m not mad.
I like the books, but Jo’s Boys always drives me mad, because of the sentimentality of Dan’s redemption and unrequited love. I re-read the whole series every couple of years, and then feel sort of treacly.
Has anyone read the novel March, based on the life of Mr. March? I’ve just borrowed it and haven’t started. It won the Pulitzer this year.
Oh, I also wanted to mention how often I reference LW (to myself, mostly) – every time I have one glove on and one glove off, I think about how Meg decided she and Jo could each wear one glove and carry a lemonade-stained glove.
I use “It’s your only beauty!” or more often, change it to “It’s my only beauty!” whenever I get caught up in something trivial, like “I broke a nail … and IT’S MY ONLY BEAUTY!” “The jelly won’t jell !” is good whenever something simple isn’t working.
There’s a game where you substitute one word of a famous quote with an anagram of that word, and the best result EVER (in the history of quotation games) is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any serpents.” Mr. Del has never read LW, but he heard me say that once and now we say it all the time, and it’s the first thing we say to each other when we wake up on Christmas morning.
And I always wanted to have a chapel in my closet. I think now, though, that Amy’s closet must have been the larger, walk-in kind, but when I was little I always imagined her praying while sitting on shoes and tennis rackets. It seemed very drah-mat-ic.
I had always assumed that Amy may have been suffering from a light case of scurvy which would explain her craving for limes and her family’s indulgence of it. The Victorian diet, espcially for families of modest means like the Marches, was often low on vitamins.
As a young girl, I fantasized about going back in time with a bottle of Flinstones vitamins, a bag of oranges, and a basket of wholesome, fresh vegetables and fattening up poor Beth.