BOOKS & ARTS
Little women, big issues
Lucy Mangan
Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy: The Story
of Little Women and Why it Still
Matters
by Anne Boyd Rioux
Norton, £19.99, pp. 273
The great thing about Louisa May Alcott’s
classic Little Women is that it has some-
thing for everyone: stay-at-home types
have the oldest of the March sisters, Meg,
who struggles to reconcile her love of
ease with both her responsibilities and
the family’s genteel poverty (and does at
least manage to have one night of fun at
the Moffatts’ party, sipping their cham-
pagne with one hand and sporting her sin-
gle good glove on the other, before settling
down with a nice husband and even bet-
ter linen cupboard); cool-slash-mean girls
have Amy, who wrestles with vanity — not
hugely successfully IMHO (Amy would be^
a demon with textspeak and indeed prob-
ably the first social media star from Mas-
sachusetts); romantics have Beth and her
chronic timidity and pulmonary weakness;
and tomboys, bookworms and would-be
writers, of course, have Jo to teach them
that they can earn a living in unfeminine
ways, refuse to marry the boy next door
and find a way to be free without cutting
off all ties.
It is unusual even now to give young
readers, and especially young female read-
ers, so many options with which to iden-
tify in a single book — plus a beloved but
imperfect Marmee — and to give them all
their own specific energies, interests and
flaws. In 1868 you could go so far as to say
it was unheard of. Even in Alcott’s native
America, which had skipped more lightly
over the moral and religious tales that had
gradually developed into, and still highly
influenced, the children’s literary tradition
in the old country, juvenile tales remained
at least partly aimed at helping parents
shape their offspring into good (tradition-
ally masculine) men, and even better (tra-
ditionally feminine) women.
Anne Boyd Rioux’s book, published to
coincide with Little Women’s 150th anni-
versary, is a compact but rich account of
Alcott’s life, how she came to write her most
famous and enduring work, and its effect on
her and American literature, complete with
a wide-ranging exploration and analysis of
how its public, literary and critical reception
has varied since its publication.
The life, especially if you have — as
Alcott herself was keen that readers did —
conflated the March family with Louisa’s
own over time, is striking. Unlike the cosily
settled fictional family, the Alcotts moved
30 times in 22 years, generally in the wake of
Louisa’s father’s latest misstep. Mr March
is a vision of paternal perfection in the
background of the book. Bronson Alcott
was quite the opposite, and his Transcen-
dentalist spiritual convictions (or Messiah
complex or manic depression, depending
on how modern and/or medical your turn
of mind) dominated the family, even as
they militated against him earning enough
money to support his often near-starving
and ill-clad wife and four daughters.
Rioux’s scholarly training — she is a pro-
fessor at the University of New Orleans —
gives her the strength to be scrupulously
fair to Bronson, whom she notes was sup-
portive of both Louisa and May’s creative
leanings (May, on whom Amy was funda-
mentally based, was an artist) in word if not,
debt-and-chaos-fomenter that he was, deed.
As someone who reads his proud proclama-
tion ‘I wait not upon the arithmetic of the
matter!’ as he abandoned the little school
he set up to go full-time preaching instead
as the cry of the simply incurably selfish
everywhere, I prefer the hammering he
gets in Martha Saxton’s 1977 biography of
Louisa. Second-wave feminist rage infuses
the entire thing, and burns away a lot of the
obfuscatory undergrowth that had grown
up around the author and the book in the
intervening decades.That said, Rioux’s
academic nous and
knowledge make for a
fine, detailed yet acces-
sible final third of the
book, which concen-
trates on the legacy
and influence of Little
Women (which, in the
US incorporates what
we in the UK, thanks to
a different publishing
history, think of more
often as a separate book,
Good Wives). She delin-
eates all the main areas
of debate there have
been over the years. Is it
realistic or sentimental?
Progressive (Jo with her
creative ambitions, all
with their natural, live-
ly speech and manners)
or regressive (so many
little lessons from Mar-
mee)?
Do the various
visions of domestic bliss
presented by Alcott and
her characters preclude
it being a feminist work?
Aren’t the multiple mod-
els of femininity present-
ed, even if not extreme
by our standards, and
the transgressive fore-
grounding of real female
experience (it might
not have been her whole truth, but almost
everything in the book was drawn from Alcott
and her sisters’ lives) enough to let it qualify?
Rioux also tracks its gradual disappearance
from school syllabi and from literary and
cultural history.
Though undoubtedly as groundbreaking,
influential and demonstrably as popular as
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck-
leberry Finn in their day, Alcott’s tale is no
longer held in the academic or social esteem
it once was. It has taken on overtones of
sappiness and gathered a reputation as a
simple romance when it was and remains
so much more. G.K. Chesterton, an admir-
er, said he felt like ‘an interloper’ reading
it, and some subconscious similar feeling
among the wider male-dominated world
of academics may have led to its neglect.
Rioux also posits a belief among educators
that requiring boys to read something with
the word ‘women’ in the title will put them
off reading for life.
If that is so, Little Women has big prob-
lems. But let’s hope that Rioux’s satisfy-
ing, balanced but punchy tribute to Alcott’s
great work, especially coming at a time
when women’s experience is being fore-
grounded once more, is a sign of better
things to come.Little Women, Chapter IX: ‘Meg Goes to Vanity Fair’.
Her sisters help her packGETTY IMAGES