Some Questions about Little Women

Like many people in the UK, my favouite thing on TV this Christmas was a new adaptation of Louisa M Alcott’s, Little Women – it was beautifully done.

After it finished, I nearly fell off my chair laughing at this tweet from friend and favourite author Hilary McKay:

Hilary McKay‏ @hilary_mckay 28 Dec 2017

#LittleWomen I think someone should write volume 5 (Wising Up At Last) when Jo looks at Laurie, screams I WAS INSANE and runs off with him to Italy.


(She also called for Mr March to be sectioned, yes still laughing.)


1) So my first question is: WHY HAS NO PUBLISHER COMMISSIONED HILARY MCKAY TO WRITE THIS? It would be the best book ever. Come on, someone, make it happen. If you’d seen the reaction on Twitter you would see it would be a sure-fire bestseller…




2) My second question is this: what is the book that Marmee gives to each of the girls on Christmas Day? For the 40+ years since I first read the book I have gone back and forth between Pilgrims Progress and The New Testament. What does everyone else think? I have read and re-read the passage, and I still can’t tell.

The storyline seemed to suggest PP, but as I grew older I thought ‘well hardly…’ because surely so obscure, and four copies to hand all with different colours? It seemed so unlikely, and you couldn’t imagine it happening in other books of the era. But if you research this, you find out that Pilgrim’s Progress was a massive all-time bestseller in the USA at the time, much more so than it was in Victorian Britain. I read this fascinating excerpt from an article on the book, pointing out just how universal the book was in young women’s (particularly) lives:

it remained a part of the popular American imagination and, as such, became a book frequently read by American girls and the girls they read about in their fiction. Almost every fictional girl read it, from Alice Humphreys in The Wide Wide World, to Elsie Dinsmore, to Rebecca Rowen Randall of Sunnybrook Farm. The March sisters were not alone in their fervor for Christian's journey.

The book as originally published has an epigraph which is adapted by Alcott from Pilgrim's Progress (it is not found in every edition of the book):

Go then, my little Book, and show to all
That entertain and bid thee welcome shall,
What thou dost keep close shut up in thy breast;
And wish what thou dost show them may be blest
To them for good, may make them choose to be
Pilgrims better, by far, than thee or me.
Tell them of Mercy; she is one
Who early hath her pilgrimage begun.
Yea, let young damsels learn of her to prize
The world which is to come, and so be wise;
For little tripping maids may follow God
Along the ways which saintly feet have trod.

So… what do other readers think? And what did they assume when they first read it?


3) I have to whisper this one. Does Jo get more annoying as we grow older? Was she always annoying? I think she gets a free pass because of the terrible incident where Amy destroys her book. But then… she is rude and silly and clumsy. She can’t be bothered to be polite and pleasant, and therefore she misses out on a trip to Europe – but who can blame Aunt Carrol for preferring the company of Amy, who knows how to behave, and isn’t some overgrown childish tomboy? Jo never wants anything to change – though presumably that applies only to squelching on the lives of her sisters: if she had gone to Europe would that not have been change of the kind she resisted?

No wonder she has no friends at all – Laurie was her only friend, and OF COURSE we all wanted her to marry him, but honestly, he had a narrow escape. Jo in the later books is completely dreary, pompous and priggish, and her views on child-raising are hair-raising.

When her husband suggests that “needlework is not a fashionable accomplishment [for girls], my dear.” Jo replies:

“Sorry for it. My girls shall learn all I can teach them about it, even if they give up the Latin, Algebra, and half-a-dozen ologies it is considered necessary for girls to muddle their poor brains over now-a-days.”

Jo, Jo, how could you have become that person?

4) I was interested that there were many mentions throughout the four books of cricket – was it played in the USA in the 19^th century? The first conversation Jo ever has with Lawrie centres on cricket...

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Samantha Ellis, in her marvellous book How to Be a Heroine has some good sour analysis of Little Women – you can read more of her views on the books in this excellent Guardian article.

[Added later:] The sublime Hilary Mantel has her doubts about Little Women and about Jo. This feature in a 2009 piece called Female Role Novels - find it in the recent collection of her journalism. Mantel preferred Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did.

There have been previous posts on Little Women, on Eight Cousins, which is also by Alcott, and on Hilary McKay books.

The picture of the girls is from my inherited 90-year old copy of the book, and shows the girl having their Pilgrims’ Progress meeting, spied on by Laurie.

Each wore a large, flapping hat, a brown linen pouch slung over one shoulder, and carried a long staff. Meg had a cushion, Jo a book, Beth a basket, and Amy a portfolio... 

“Mother likes to have us out-of-doors as much as possible, so we bring our work here and have nice times. For the fun of it we bring our things in these bags, wear the old hats, use poles to climb the hill, and play pilgrims, as we used to do years ago. We call this hill the Delectable Mountain, for we can look far away and see the country where we hope to live some time.”