1: Little Women

A book by Louisa May Alcott

Start as you mean to go on, they say, and it doesn’t get much more classic than Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel about the four March sisters (Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy). To be honest, it was not the book’s lofty status that prompted me to read it, rather the upcoming (back in January) new film version starring Saoirse Ronan and directed by Greta Gerwig. As a huge fan of both, it was a film I was definitely planning to see, and I was eager to get the source material read before I did so.

Despite its classic status and myriad previous adaptations, I’d had bafflingly little exposure to Little Women before reading it. The only inkling I had of its plot came from the Friends episode when Joey reads it.

Rachel deals out some pretty major spoilers in the course of the episode, but fortunately enough I could barely remember them. The only line of dialogue that I could recall from the episode went: “______ dies!” But my brain had obligingly opted to omit the relevant name, so I was able to dive into the book about as cold as is possible 150 years on from its publication.

In the knowledge that it’s impossible to say anything original about Little Women, I present my one-word review: glorious. I will concede to some early concerns about drowning in a deluge of saccharine, but they were unfounded. The book has enough salt to balance out the sweet.

In a number of London’s Tube stations, before or after the barriers, passengers are greeted by a whiteboard bearing an ever-changing “Quote of the Day”.

Little Women is packed with enough aphorisms, bon mots and pearls of wisdom to keep each of these boards employed for several weeks. And I mean this as a compliment: to the beautiful way Alcott writes, to the variety of Little Women’s characters, and to the remarkable relevance the book still has today.

Given it’s been five-ish months since I actually read the book, I flicked to a (genuinely) random page (217 in my Penguin English Library edition) for a quick reminder of its quality. Three lines in, Meg says this: “I wish I had no heart, it aches so.” That’s positively Shakespearean! (I use that word advisedly.) You feel the pain Meg is in, and I think that’s where Little Women excels so brilliantly. You feel every moment of grief, anger, delight, disappointment, excitement, happiness along with the March sisters. And that’s coming from a 30-year-old man in London in 2020 who categorically did not live through the American Civil War and has never had to sell any hair of any kind.

While writing Little Women, Alcott confided to her journal that she did not find the task enjoyable because she “never liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting though I doubt it”. Is that like Fitzgerald doubting people would take an interest in Jay Gatsby? Or Melville pausing to ponder the marketability of his story about a whale? I’d say it’s close enough.