Little Women

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website.

If you scroll down the page for this edition you find a reading list to go with it.

I hope you enjoyed the programme.

Hello, when Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868, she only did so at the urging of her publisher and father who hoped it would make money for all three of them and it did.

This coming-of-age story of Meg, Joe, Beth and Amy March has delighted generations of readers and is credited with starting a new genre of fiction for young adults, especially girls.

Alcott wrote the second part of it in 1869 and further sequels and spin-offs, and her works inspired countless directors, composers and authors to make a myriad of reimagined versions ever since.

With me to discuss Louisa May Alcott's Little Women are Tom Wright, reader in rhetoric and head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Sussex, Erin Forbes, senior lecturer in African, American and US Literature at the University of Bristol.

And Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds.

Bridget, Alcott's childhood was unconventional to say the least.

What would you pick out?

The major...

thing I'd pick out about her childhood was that she was born to parents who were committed to social justice and reform and who were very unafraid of living an eccentric style of life according perhaps to today's standards.

So her mother, Abigail May Alcott, known as Abby, would frequently give away some of her clothing to people who were poorer than herself.

She was working as a social worker.

And Alcott used to say, My mother often looked a little bit decrepit.

Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, known as Bronson, was an educator, a pedagogue who ran experimental schools, whose methods were eccentric according to the standards of the day, but today perhaps have a longevity and we might be much more sympathetic towards them.

They were intellectuals, they were interested in working, they were interested in educating their daughters to perform labour in the world, and

according to their intellectual beliefs and their social beliefs, they formed the ways in which their children were raised.

She had three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and Abigail.

They were very broke.

They were very broke.

They might not seem so broke to us because they were well-off enough to have well-off neighbours who supported them, including influential intellectual figures of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

So they weren't at the levels of poverty that really poor people were experiencing, but they were genteel and poor in that way.

As I said before, the parents would often give their clothing away.

They were generous towards others.

They lost money repeatedly.

Bronson was famously

useless with money.

He wasn't a good financial support for his family.

When he was very young, he went off to try and support his parents by working as a peddler and ended up having to be bailed out by them.

And this story was the characteristic of his life.

He was always being bailed out by others.

So he was a loving father who contributed to his family in all kinds of caring ways.

But financially, he was not a prudent figure.

Did that leave the children with the notion that they had to make the money?

They did, and they actually did have to make the money.

So they sewed, Alcott, for instance, she sowed to make her living.

While she was sewing, she was thinking about her writing.

She was writing to, even as a young, very young person, she was also teaching others.

And her sisters were also working in order to make the money that perhaps their father should have been making for them and wasn't.

And he was often away from home at crucial times.

The idea of transcendentalism makes an entrance here, Tom.

Can you tell the listeners about that idea and why it was important?

Yeah, the Transcendentalist movement was a group of writers and artists in New England from the 1830s to the 1860s, a group of people who had three ideas basically in common.

The first idea was the fact that all living things, nature, is a unity.

The second idea is that mankind is innately good.

The third idea is that reason, rationality, is less important than insight and revelation.

Now,

well, I was going to say, Melvin, lots of your listeners might be thinking, hey, this sounds like what in Europe here, in Germany and England, might have been called Romanticism a generation earlier, Schlegel or Wordsworth.

But it has a very American twist in New England.

It's got a kind of cultural nationalism.

It's supposed to be pushing back against Europe.

It's got a new world energy and it's got a kind of religiosity.

And as Bridget has said, it became associated with this ex-priest called Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in the 1830s published a book called Nature, influenced a lot by Bronson's writings.

And he amassed a circle of thinkers around him that used these ideas that I mentioned, took them in really interesting directions.

So Margaret Fuller used these ideas to think about the place of women in society.

Henry David Thoreau about the harmony of how you live in harmony with nature.

And Walt Whitman,

how you might revolutionise poetry.

And they were quite marginal figures, but you couldn't ignore them in American culture.

And some people hated them.

Now, I know you've done a programme on Edgar Allan Poe before.

He hated them, he thought they were pretentious hippies, they were full of it, and they were charlatans, but you couldn't ignore these people.

They really put American literature on the map.

Bronson was one of these people, and he lived these ideas.

And as Brisiet had already said, you know, in some ways, Louisa May Olcott's life, she was the beneficiary of these ideas.

But in other ways, they lived on a commune that didn't work.

She may have felt when she was starving in the winter because these ideals weren't working that she was the victim of transcendentalist ideas.

And in her writing throughout her life, she criticised and was quite scornful about her dad's successes.

Yeah, I think those ideas are still there in Little Women, and we can see that work as a transcendental work.

Can you pull out one or two of the specific cultural processes that

she went through as a child?

Yeah, so she grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, just outside Boston and in Boston.

And this is a place that's really iconic in the American historical imagination.

First of all, because it's, you know, Boston and Concord, it's where the Revolution breaks out, the Boston Tea Party, 1773, and the American War of Independence breaks out in 1775 in Concord.

But 50 years later, when Louise is growing up, it's suddenly the center of an American cultural and intellectual flowering.

And it's got these three dimensions to it.

It's literary.

You know, she could go to the end of her street in Concord and see lectures each week, politicians, explorers, intellectuals of the day.

She also knew some of the great intellectuals of the day.

Emerson and Thoreau were her friends.

They took her on walks, taught her about nature, let her run free in their library, in their house.

And she was also surrounded by activists then.

So social reform is the other part of the culture.

Temperance reform, trying to free women from drunken husbands and that kind of thing.

Abolition.

trying to fight against slavery and her father was you know helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada and he was an educator as well.

And he had very progressive ideas about education.

The kind of thing that today in education you might call orosy, you know, dialogue between pupils rather than filling them with facts.

And the final thing is it's a really spiritual culture.

This is really unconventional Christianity.

Lots of people are pushing back against Calvinism and trying to create new sects and new forms of Christianity.

So she was nearly on the poverty line a lot.

She moved 30 times when she was growing up.

But despite all of that, she was really well connected and had this immensely rich cultural life.

Thank you very much.

Erin, Erin Falls, we've heard that she was reluctant to write Little Women at the start.

And as we know, she wrote over 200 books, which I'm still trying to absorb.

I don't mean the books, I mean the fact of it.

What had she written up to Little Women?

Yes, she was an extremely prolific writer.

As you say, we know over 200 works of hers, and we are still discovering more and more works.

There are still works of Luce Malcotts to be uncovered uncovered because she didn't only write under her own name.

She also wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, including Flora Fairfield.

Under the name of Flora Fairfield, she liked to write poetry, the sort of naturally inspired poetry, poetry inspired by the natural world that Tom has been talking about.

She served as a Civil War nurse before writing Little Women, and she had an autobiographical account of her experiences as a Civil War nurse that she published again under a pseudonym.

pseudonym.

This time the pseudonym was Tribulation Periwinkle, so a bit playful.

But what she loved to write most of all in the period leading up to her writing of Little Women were sensation stories, thrillers, mysteries,

yes.

So thrillers, mysteries, gothic tales, themes of betrayal, revenge, forbidden romance.

And given the elite

high-flying society that she was surrounded with in Concord, she published this either anonymously or pseudonymously.

Most of these works were published under the name of A.

M.

Barnard.

And Louisa May Alcott was somebody who was known in her time.

She had many correspondents.

She journaled copiously.

So it's not the case that nobody had any idea that she wrote works like this.

Could you give listeners a brief idea?

Uh-huh.

Outline of the plot of Little Women.

Oh, yes.

Okay.

So the novel is published in two separate parts.

The first part is published in 1868.

the second part is published in 1869.

And the first part of the novel takes place over the course of one year where the father is absent.

He's gone off to serve the Union Army as a Civil War chaplain, leaving this very female-centered space with four sisters, Meg, Joe, Beth, and Amy.

and their mother Marmie and a servant who's living in the house with them and helping them keep everything together named Hannah.

It's modeled after Pilgrim's Progress and the sisters each each in the first part of the novel identify a key flaw that they have and work to try to overcome it over the course of the novel.

Megs, for example, is vanity.

Jo has a terrible temper.

Beth, she's extremely good, but she's very shy, so she's working to maybe overcome some of that shyness.

And Amy, the youngest sister, is selfish and also vain.

The second part picks up in their adulthood.

Over the course of 15 years, we learn who the little women marry, what their relationships are like, how they grow up, and I'm sorry there are spoilers, but Beth dies in the second half of the novel.

We all know where we are, thank you.

Bridget, we've talked about her war experience.

Can you develop this a little and say how it turned into writing?

Yeah, so thinking of the novel first, the very opening line of the novel, Christmas Won't Be Christmas Without Any Presents, reveals to us immediately as readers that something has happened.

And we soon discover that the reason why the girls don't have presents is because Mammy thinks it would be inappropriate for them to spend money on pleasure while men were fighting in the war.

So right from the opening of the novel, we can see that the civil war is the kind of absent present, like the father, that's always there, that's spoken about

peripherally, but is always present throughout the novel.

It's the thing that allows the novel to happen.

It's what allows the father, at least in the first part, to be absent from the novel.

And the novel is absolutely kind of saturated by it in that way, though it's also,

it doesn't have to be spoken about it because everybody knows this.

If we just have a few dates about the war itself, because it might be useful just to situate it in that way.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.

And on the 1st of January, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was passed which meant that

enslaved people in slave states were no longer enslaved.

The Civil War itself ran from 1861 to 1865 so immediately before the novel was written and Alcott a keen Unionist was desperate to enlist but as a woman she couldn't.

She couldn't fight in the war.

So instead she waited till her 30th birthday, which was the earliest time at which a woman could become a nurse.

And as we've already heard, she became a nurse.

And she travelled down to Georgetown where she worked for, she signed up for three months, but actually, she quickly got typhoid fever.

So after six weeks, she had to stop.

And she did write this extraordinary work called Hospital Sketches, which, though it's light-hearted in some ways, when you actually read the detail of what she's saying, it's profoundly shocking.

She was obviously extremely shocked by the kind of physical work she had to do, by washing men's bodies, by seeing the deep, deep trauma of war, and then also seeing the ways that diseases unrelated to the war then swept through the hospital, killing people.

And one thing she says that's very notable to me anyway is that the hospital was formerly a hotel, and the signs from the hotel were still up around her.

And she says the ballroom was still a ballroom because it was full of men whose bodies had been shot through with bullets.

So it's both kind of light-hearted and really profoundly shocking.

Tom, had she to be persuaded to write this novel?

If so, by whom?

Yeah, this is part of the myth of the novel,

the myth of little women.

And I'll try and do justice to the story.

It's quite a famous story.

So it's the late 1860s, as Bridget and Erin have told us.

Louisa May Alcott is gaining a name for herself as a writer of quite serious works about the Civil War.

She's also making money, often using pseudonyms, through writing what she sometimes called her rubbish they have to have money and she's the big the big money owner yeah so any stuff that gets money back is good so she she considered writing the sensation stuff her rubbish but she knew it paid really well but then a publisher called thomas niles approached her he'd spotted a gap in the market he saw that there were lots of books for teenage boys and he saw that there were none for teenage girls.

He thought, this is a shrewd gap.

I know how to fill it.

I'm going to ask Louisa May Olcott to do that.

She was having none of it.

She was making far more money doing sensation fiction and gaining a serious life for herself.

And also she said, I don't know anything about girls.

I don't like girls.

I know nothing of them.

And she had to be persuaded.

Now Thomas Niles did this in quite an underhand way.

He said, look,

if you write this story, I will publish your dad's book of philosophical

fantasies and speculations.

Look, this book was never going to get published in any other way.

And she was manipulated then into writing to save her dad's career and to save her family's fortunes because her mum mum was quite sick.

So she began work on Little Women.

And you'll remember in Little Women, there's one of the most famous scenes in that when Jo falls into what she calls a vortex, when she's in this kind of flow state of writing, which anyone who's one of the four children.

Jo is one of the four children, kind of the main one.

The tomboy.

The tomboy, the main one, and she becomes a writer.

And a bit like Joe, Louisa May Olcott falls into this vortex and she writes Little Women in 12 weeks, 400 pages, sends it to the publisher.

She thinks it's rubbish.

The publisher reads it and thinks, yeah, I kind of agree.

I don't like this at all.

But his two girl children read it and say, Dad, we love this.

This is exactly what people want.

So he publishes it.

Reviewers agree.

Reviewers spot that it's immediately something totally new.

It's a kind of young adult fiction that's not speaking down to

its audience and it's fresh and all that kind of thing.

And then she's lent on to provide a sequel, as Erin was telling us.

Everyone's saying, who are they going to marry?

And someone was joking, will it be called Wedding Marches, the second volume of the book.

And she said, it really afflicts me the way that publishers are urging me to marry them off.

So she has quite contrary solutions to that.

But she delivers this second book again, writes it really quick, published in 1869.

This is really where it becomes a cultural phenomenon.

It sells 20,000 copies in the first few weeks.

And a family friend in New York.

and Boston talks about how it, you know, he was there and merchants and clerks and people across all walks of life and genders were saying, Have you read Little Women?

Have you read Little Women?

It became a cultural phenomenon.

People start going to Louise's house in Concord, knocking on the door, Jio worshippers flocking to her.

So this book that she didn't want to write suddenly became one of the late 19th century's key cultural and literary phenomena.

And has remained so ever since.

Erin,

can you give us a sketch?

of these four sisters, starting with Meg, the oldest.

Yeah, so at the beginning of the novel, Meg is 16 years old.

Meg is a rule follower.

She's very pretty, and she is very, very attracted, this is her fault, to beautiful things, beautiful material objects.

She wants to have nice things, the nicer things that the richer girls around her have.

And her struggle is to try to overcome that.

Then she ends about to be married till Mary three years after.

That first part of the novel.

Jo

is 15 at the start of the novel.

She's described as being very much like a colt.

She loved to run.

She loved to play boys' games.

She had what's described in several places in the novel as a gentlemanly manner.

And she's also a writer.

She is passionate about her writing.

As Tom said, she'll fall into her vortex.

She's got a special pinafore that she wears to absorb the ink stains as she's writing.

And that's her passion.

Beth is 13 years old when the novel begins, and she is goodness itself, tranquility.

She's a deer and nothing else, her sister says.

She has kittens that she likes to play with, dolls that she's constantly dressing, and she takes care of the housework because she's too shy to go to school.

Amy, the littlest sister, is the golden child.

She's got curly hair.

Everybody's fussing over her all the time.

And she's got a sense of her own importance.

And she is an artist.

She's drawn to the art world.

Beth, I should say, is a musician as well.

She plays the piano quite beautifully.

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Bridget, there's a strong work, I think.

One of the things on this play that you have to work to live properly.

Where'd that come from?

It came from Protestantism.

fundamentally.

Absolutely, work is highly valorised throughout this novel.

Work is a form of virtue.

It's seen more as a form of virtue than a form of money-making.

So working for capitalist profit is not lauded.

Working for self-improvement to help others, to develop the mind, to develop personal qualities, is lauded.

And this is evident right the way through the novel.

Very early on, there's a chapter called Experiment, where the girls decide they want to have a holiday, and the mother indulges them.

This epitomises the kind of pedagogical moment that the real Alcott parents specialised in.

So, the mother indulges them, she allows them not to do any labour, not to do their household chores, not to do anything, and over a period of time they become fractious, bored, they argue,

they hate each other, they hate themselves and they learn, of course they learn because it's little women, that actually work is a form of valour and they go back to their work happy because they've learnt this.

Next door to them, we haven't really talked about him yet, is a really key figure in the novel.

He's a kind of extra little woman, except he's a boy called Laurie, although actually he's a kind of quite a feminine boy I mean she's very interested in playing around with gender roles in this novel and Laurie is a wealthy young boy he's bored he's lonely and he's lazy and he's always lazy and this is critiqued right the way through the novel such that there's one chapter simply called Lazy Lawrence where he's traveling in Europe with Amy who he will eventually marry and she turns on him and says you lead a life of luxury you've never applied yourself to anything I can have no sympathy with anyone who behaves in the way that you behave.

You better get yourself sorted out.

And in the novel's terms, he does.

And he applies himself not really to business, though we know he's making money kind of somehow in the background, but we never see him going out to work in that way.

But actually, the work he applies himself to is the work of being a loving man, a good husband, and a good father.

So we can see the feminism in this novel that actually the work for men of being loving heterosexual partners, going into the nursery and helping with child-rearing, is as important, if not more important, than going out to work in the world of labour.

So this is really interesting in a novel of this kind, where 19th-century novels, mid-century novels often valorise

a domestic ideology which places women at the centre of the home but sends men off to work outside of it.

This novel doesn't do that.

Thank you, Tom.

Just to follow up, there are very few men there

in the book, largely absent.

Why does that matter?

Well, especially in the first part, you know, Bridget introduced, she said that the introductory paragraphs of the book introduces the four characters and says that they're all bound together with this darkness because the dad is away.

He's serving in the army.

And it's supposed to be the source of great...

Yeah.

He's supposed to be the source of great sorrow.

But what's interesting is actually in that first part of the book, it's really quite giddy.

It's quite freeing.

This lack of men.

Women take centre-stage.

There's no male figures of authority that you'd usually find in a book of this kind.

And it's women's concerns that are at the centre, women's development spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, that's right at the heart.

And

there's a contemporary American writer called Alison Beschdel, and she has this idea about the Beschdel test, where you can work out whether a work of fiction takes women seriously.

And listeners may know this: that the test is: do two women in a narrative speak to each other seriously about something that isn't a man?

And at various points in the first part of Little Women,

that test is definitely passed in fascinating ways.

So, why is the dad not there is an interesting question.

Why is Bronson not there?

You know, in some ways, Louisa May Alcock may have thought, My dad is just too weird to put into a book like this.

She may have been trying to take revenge on him because he was not really much of a dad.

She wanted to get him out of the way.

She described people like him and his transcendentalist friends as like a balloon that the women around were trying to pull back down to earth using strings.

And so in the novel, she just gets rid of him.

And it maybe sums up the way in which she conceived and managed to achieve a life that didn't revolve around men.

She earned money for herself.

And she's making this broader point, I think, in especially in the early, the first part of Little Women, that it's critiquing gender roles.

And it's saying that you can reconstruct American society from a female point of view, like happened in the home front during the Civil War.

And that's why I think, you know, people like us, critics, when looking at books like this, we use this phrase, the cultural work of a book.

That is to say, the influence of it isn't just about the artistic value, it's about the ripples it has through culture.

And the cultural work of this is to raise the expectations of female agency.

Underneath this very placid surface, domestic surface, young girls are being encouraged to see female agency, female independence.

and that's the cultural work.

Yet, yet, the fans of the novel wanted Jo to get married, and she does get married.

And

for many of us, this is the novel's great failure.

She says, Alcott says, I'm, you know, I had to do this, my fans wanted me to do this, so I made a funny match for her, she says, in marrying Jo to an older, bearded,

rather overweight, not very handsome German professor.

So she thinks of this as a funny match.

So she, yes, on the one hand, she creates agency for women, but Jo can never be the thing she wants to be.

On the other hand, again, spoiler alert, Beth, who is somehow too good for this world, literally is too good for this world, and she dies.

And for some, it's

a bad attack of scarlet fever.

Because she's being dutiful.

Because she's being dutiful, because she's going to visit the poor Hummel family.

It is not her job to do that, but her sisters are kind of messing around and don't really want to do it.

She, of course, does it because she is the good girl.

Of course, she's also a weaker girl.

She gets scarlet fever, never really gets over this, and eventually dies.

And for some of us, not a moment too soon.

But that's maybe just me.

I find her insufferable.

All that goodness.

All that goodness.

Have you ever met anybody who's too good?

No.

Not that I have liked.

That might be the answer.

It is the answer, isn't it?

I mean, what about this?

We've sort of skipped over it.

Her preference for earlier than little women for a lurid, gothic life and slush it away with deceptions and

terrible stuff, so so like hot cakes.

Thank you very much.

It seems so far away from little women, doesn't it?

Oh yes, very much so.

So when we think of Little Women, we think of this novel as being sort of full of sunshine and teas and picnics and adventures and a handsome neighbor next door

and girls, one of whom is terribly good,

just working to make themselves better and better.

And that is certainly what the novel is about.

But at the same time, I think when we realize that Alcott was an author drawn to the lurid style, which he calls the lurid style, and these blood and thunder tales, and we take those glasses and we look back at Little Women, we can see quite clearly, actually, a darker ribbon running through.

So, some of the scenes that we've already talked about, for example, Bridget mentioned the chapter Experiments, where the girls give up work for a period of time.

One of the things that happens, it's quite easy to gloss past, is that Beth's canary dies because nobody remembers to feed it.

So they have to have this very sad bird funeral, which it is presented as somewhat humorous, but it builds quite clearly as a foreshadowing of in the chapter where Beth goes to see the Hummels because her sisters are shirking this duty.

A baby dies in her arms.

She's a 13-year-old girl.

She comes home.

She locks herself up in a room.

Her sister comes, what's the matter?

It turns out that while she was at the Hummels, this infant child died in her arms, and she sat there holding it for what sounds like quite a long period of time.

I don't think that ever shows up in any of the film versions.

It's a little too dark.

It quite clearly is foreshadowed by the canary scene and then leads into the scene in which Beth ultimately herself dies

and becomes this sort of ghost in her.

That's one of them, but there are several come and go, don't they?

They go quite quickly, but they also come along.

Yes, I mean, and even at the very end of the novel, we have this happy birthday, Marmee's 60th birthday.

Her family is gathered around her.

These little women have grown so beautifully into such wonderful older women, and we have the sweet ghost of Beth haunting the house.

But two things: Amy's daughter, little Beth, is described as being very frail and probably not long to live.

And Joe has opened this wonderful school for boys with Professor Bear and he's very happy and it's a very lively place.

But there's every chance, Joe says, that it's going to be burned down one night by a reckless boy who can't stop playing with fire.

So this sort of grim thread running throughout right to the very end of the novel.

Bridget, there's a lot of wealth which comes along in great big bundles, a lot of what we can call poverty, not genteel poverty, poverty poverty.

What do you make of the way she dealt with that?

Well, you see the real poverty right at the beginning of the novel when, having given up their Christmas presents, the girls go along with their mother to visit a poor German family.

And there's no hiding just how terrible their poverty is.

This is the German family whose baby will eventually die, as we've just heard.

This will kill Beth.

They have no fire, they have no food, there's no man in the house to provide, there's no way of making money, and the family go there and they have to spend their time stuffing rags into the cracks in the windows to try and keep the house a little bit warm.

And there's no kind of glossing over the fact that this is very grim.

And throughout the novel, that family, though it's not invoked all the time, it's always there as a kind of backdrop, i.e., there is great poverty going on side by side, very close to where this family live, and experience their lesser version of poverty that's nonetheless difficult.

Because although the March family isn't poor in the way that the Hummel family is poor, the girls all have to go out to work.

There's no choice about that.

And their financial, the money that they bring in is absolutely fundamental to the economic basis of the household in which they live.

So there's no choice about it at all.

And they are just very young girls.

They're not adults.

We are giving a darker view.

I mean, it's regarded as a happy, on the whole, happy, contented book.

Can you give give us a taste of that?

No, indeed.

And like I said earlier, this work is regarded as virtuous.

You know, it's a form of contribution to the family, and the family is extraordinarily discursive, conversational, supportive, joyous.

Tom mentioned earlier a little about the kind of physical activity.

This is something that both Bronson, sorry, both Alcott parents really encouraged in their daughters.

Alcott herself would say, you know, I do my 20 miles in four hours or five hours and then go to a party in the evening.

She was very physically fit and active.

You see this in the family all the time.

The girls are always running around outside.

They put on plays, they perform plays, they read a great deal, they talk to each other all the time.

And though the family is poor, when they do go out to social occasions, and this is often depicted in extremely funny ways, Joe goes out to a social occasion.

Joe's the tomboy.

Joe's the tomboy.

Of course she has burnt her dress.

Of course everything is a mess.

Of course nothing is tidy.

But she goes out to a party with her vain older sister Meg, who wishes to impress everyone.

Meg wears a pair of high heels that she then hurts her foot in.

And Jo has

because she can't walk in them.

Some of us know about these things still.

And Jo has to kind of hang around, lurk around by the wall all evening because half her dress is burnt and she doesn't want it to show up.

So it's all done, it's very humorous.

I mean it is it is actually a funny novel.

There are laugh out loud moments and Jo is slangy, she is unconventional, she's a tomboy, much like Alcott herself.

Alcott herself said when I was a child, I'd only be friends with boys if I could beat them running a race.

And I'd only be friends with girls if they'd climb a tree with me or jump over a fence.

They were the only types of people I liked spending time with.

So

she's she's funny.

Yeah, Alcott herself was very funny, very blunt, very to the point.

Can we switch to something that was on the horizon but also in the middle of the book?

And that's the civil war, with the father being away, chaplain in danger, and one of the husbands comes back,

one of the sisters comes back wounded, and so on.

They are abolitionists.

Do we hear a great deal about that in the book?

We don't.

It's really surprising, especially if you think about Alcott as

someone who's so steeped in abolition.

Her dad was an abolitionist, her mum was an abolitionist, she knew this issue inside out.

But it's not there.

This war is presented like it could be about anything.

And you could make clever arguments for why that is.

You could say that she's just trying to focus on the domestic so that she can trace moral progress within the home.

But really, I think the answer is clear.

She's a hard-headed businesswoman.

It's 1868.

She knows that her audience, white middle-class women in the north, didn't want to read about the war and its causes that are still dividing the country and why their brothers and uncles have come back with wooden legs or died.

And she just makes a conscious decision to to not mention slavery throughout the book.

Is this a commercial decision?

I think it is.

And it's um of a piece with her um business-minded pursuit of her career.

Now, you can see that just like Bridget was saying, the second part of the book in particular, lots of that what I was trying to say was a latent feminism is drained out of it by the the plot and the marriage plot.

And you might say that the same critique is there because it avoids these issues of racial justice and it's symptomatic maybe of how transatlanticist ideas about moral interior moral progress ignore some social factors but and this is a big but at the end of the book you get a glimpse of what Louisa Medie Alcott was really thinking about these issues Joe sets up a school with a professor bear

and just like her father in Boston she accepts a black child, you know, a quadroon, 19th century language for a mixed race pupil, a merry little quadroon, joined the school.

And it says in the book, even though that might spell ruin.

Now, our dad had allowed black kids into his school in Boston, and the white kids withdrew, the white parents withdrew their children, and it ruined his career, but he stood up for his beliefs about racial justice and that kind of thing.

And so you see right at the end...

of the novel Joe's character seems like she's going to inherit this anti-racist sentiment that comes from the Olcott family.

Even if slavery is not there, you get one little glimmer, if you know where to look for it, that their hearts are in the right place.

And there's another moment in the novel, and this is really a complicated one, where

a fair is put on to make, to raise money for the freedmen, as they're called, so emancipated, formerly enslaved people.

Now,

actually, what you might expect is that this would be supported in the novel, but actually, what you see is it's largely run by a group of rather vain, wealthy, upper-class women.

And it's critiqued because it's simply silly, even though, or it's not wholly critiqued, but it's kind of critiqued for being a bit silly and a bit, it's used to teach a certain kind of lesson about vanity.

But in real terms, in the fight against enslavement, these anti-slavery fairs were actually incredibly important in raising money.

So she raises it, but she's also kind of showing the ways in which in some people's hands social justice is being used as a way to create social cachet for themselves.

and she doesn't like that.

Erin, what changed in fiction because of this book?

Well, this is a book that's written at the dawn of what you could say is the age of the modern age of children's literature.

Of course, there had been fairy tales and all sorts of works written for children, oriented toward children previously, but growing out of these ideas of Romanticism and Transcendentalism, we have a different idea of childhood as a particular state of life with particular types of literary content that would be appropriate to it.

So, shortly before

Little Women, Alice in Wonderland appears, so it's right around the same time as that.

But it's not until much later in the 19th century that we get other novels that we might put alongside Little Women in our heads, like Heidi or Anne of Green Gables or Secret Garden.

So, this idea of a novel that takes very seriously the lives of highly individual girls, young women, and focuses focuses simply on their domestic adventures and their development of their characters is something that's new with little women and that influences a whole range of children's literature that comes afterward through to our time, really.

Tom, what about his afterlife?

Yeah, so there's an incredible number of quite unexpected people who are inspired by the book, you know, like Patty Smith, Simone de Beauvoir, Belle Hooks, all of these people who claim it quite unexpectedly

as having transformed their life.

But I think the afterlife of the book isn't just about the book, it's about

how it has a life for itself on stage and in particular on screen.

And unlike other 19th century books, fiction like Dickens or Uncle Tom's Cabin that go to the stage immediately, it doesn't do that because the Olcott family won't let it.

They won't let it be adapted.

So it's not until the 1910s that it goes to Broadway.

It's a big hit on Broadway.

By that time, it's already been made into films.

Now, the first film of Little Women is made here in Britain, 1917, a silent film.

There's one made in America in 1918.

And then every decade there's a new version of Little Women that has the hallmarks of what each generation wants to see in it.

And I think there's just three that I think are really interesting.

1933.

Okay, Catherine Hepburn plays Joe.

It's a really famous version.

Really goes for the tomboy aspect, if anyone's seen it.

You know, she's sliding down the banister, she's having fencing matches with Laurie, and it's really going for the gender role kind of theme.

There is a 1949 version with Elizabeth Taylor as Amy that isn't that great.

I saw that.

It seems pretty good.

Well, I mean,

she was far too beautiful to play Joe, but then again, that happens again in 1994, which is the next version I'm going to talk about.

Winona Ryder played Joe.

Potentially miscast, I'm not sure.

But the Australian director, Gillian Armstrong, sets it with a star-studded cast.

Christian Bale plays Laurie and Susan Sarantham plays Marmee.

And they do two things in the 90s.

They introduce new dialogue that makes it more progressive.

They put suffragette kind of speeches in the mouth of Joe, which is not there in the book.

But they also do this thing that becomes really influential.

They start to conflate Louisa May Olcott with Joe.

They start to conflate the two characters.

And that really comes to its head in the version that most people, most listeners to this will have seen.

The most recent version, the film version, Greta Gerwig's 2019 Little Women, in which Sir Sharon plays Joe.

And this is a spoiler for those who haven't seen the film, it plays it so that she ends up being Louisa May Olcott having written the story that we've just watched?

She's written Little Women as a result of that.

And I think what that tells us is at this point, people are fascinated by this book as much because of this author, because she has this remarkable career and independence

as a self-funding, independent female creator in the 19th century that we respect almost as much as the character of Jo that is at the heart of this.

What do you think?

We're coming to the end now, Aaron.

But what do you think most grabs readers?

What is the we've got to read because?

For me, what's so interesting about Little Women is the way that these four sisters, and indeed their mother, who confesses at one point to Joe that she's angry nearly every day of her life, are very realistic characters with struggles, struggles and strengths.

Struggles and strengths that anybody can identify with.

So it's very common for readers of Little Women to say, I'm a Joe.

Oh, I'm Amy.

Not so many people will identify with Beth because, of course, she's so good.

And only the really boring amongst us, such as myself, might identify with Meg.

But this idea of these girls providing different sorts of prototypes for white femininity that various readers, even indeed across races at times, can look to to think about their own struggles with the world of work and womanhood and patriarchy, masculinity.

Bridget.

Yeah, I think it has this legacy of thinking about

how complex it still is to become and be and live as a woman.

Also, a woman who has ambitions beyond domesticity but that include domesticity.

So I think the negotiation of the complex roles of women's lives, I think that's a really important and actually kind of lasting part of this.

I find when I teach it as well, that question of students always want to know which girl are you, you, which woman are you?

And actually, which girl are you, Melvin?

If you had to be one of the girls, which is Joe, of course, yes.

Yeah, everyone wants, well, everyone perhaps wants to be Joe, perhaps, except Aaron.

I would like to be Joe.

I'm a Middle Age European academic, so I'm Professor Bear.

Yeah.

Well, thank you all very much.

Thank you very much.

Bridget Bennett, Aaron Forbes, and Tom Wright.

Next week, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, it's the rise and fall of the Venetian Empire.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Time for you, Bridget.

What would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say?

I would have liked to have said a bit more about Beth's death because I think it's unlike other literary deaths, especially deaths of young girls and women around this time.

So I was thinking that death that I wanted to think about was the death of Little Nell in the old curiosity shop, 1840 to 41.

This is a death that's awaited so with such kind of bated breath in the United States that famously crowds were at the docks in New York saying,

is Nell dead yet?

waiting for the latest editions of this novel to come.

And if you read this, famously Oscar Wilde says, you know, you must have had a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.

It's very full of pathos, of sentiment.

Repeatedly, you hear, she is dead, she was dead.

You hear this again and again and again.

So that's one death.

The next death after that I was thinking of is the death of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's cabin.

This iconic death of a Christ-like white girl who simply cannot live because slavery exists in the world.

So she expires, it's too much for her.

And it's an iconic death that drives its way through the novel.

But when it comes to the death of Beth in Little Women, Alcott, who has seen a number of deaths in this time, who has been a nurse in the Civil War, she simply says, seldom, except in books, do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or depart with beautified countenances.

So she just slips away very gently.

And this reveals a set of different things.

One is there's been so much death at this point in the United States.

How could you write this another way?

But the other is this really important shift that Tom was talking about early on between Calvinism and Transcendentalism or between Calvinism and Unitarianism, different forms of Protestantism in which there's a belief in the innate goodness of people.

So the deathbed scene doesn't have to be the moment at which you reveal whether you are one of the elect, whether you're going to go to heaven, or whether you're like the rest of us and you're going to go to hell.

Within Calvinism, the deathbed scene is really important for determining or for speaking about which way you're going going up or down.

It doesn't have to happen.

So I think that's really important in this novel.

Erin, is there anything you'd like to add?

Well, we didn't talk as much as we might have about Jo and what we're talking about as her tomboy nature.

That's something that

contemporary scholars have dug into a little bit deeper.

And even in terms of adaptations, there's been an adaptation where Jo is represented as a lesbian.

There are questions about Jo's sort of gender dysphoria that we haven't discussed that are quite interesting.

So, in the very first chapter of the novel, she says that she can't get over her disappointment in not being a boy, which feels like a very sort of tomboy type of moment.

But when we pair that with some of Alcott's own statements about her own struggle with her gender identity,

there are questions that open up about really what was the nature of Jo and by extension, Alcott's own struggles with gender and gender identity and fitting into these paradigms.

Tom?

Yeah.

It's a fascinating discussion.

I think there's two things.

One is it fits into this tradition of so many American masterpieces that are aimed or could be mistaken for being children's books.

Huckleby Finn, even Moby Dick, at various points in their

book couldn't be a children's book.

But it's been marketed as such.

It's something you're supposed to read.

Well, never mind.

It's merely a

deeply philosophical work.

And you might say that the same is true of women.

But the other thing about the book is the gendered readership.

So many times when you hear people discussing and when I've discussed this book, if I discuss it with female friends, it changed their life.

If I discuss it with male friends, they say, I haven't read it actually.

And it's that use of that word actually that fascinates me because they know they should have done and they know the importance of the book, but they don't know the book.

And I wonder whether that gender divide still persists.

Interesting, Tom, when you were speaking about the Bechdel test earlier, I was thinking about that as well as I've been reading Little Women recently.

And I think that one interesting thing about the novel, and tell me if you guys think this is correct, I don't think it passes a reverse Bechdel test.

I don't think there are ever two male characters who have a conversation with each other that's not about a woman.

Lori and his grandfather have a conversation after Beth has, I'm sorry, after Joe has rejected Laurie's proposal.

And that's, I think, the only conversation I can...

think of that's depicted on page between two male characters at all.

Professor Baer

and Joe March's father are depicted as really liking to have conversations, but we don't hear any of them.

So in terms of the feminism of the novel, I think that's an interesting

thing.

I think that's right.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you.

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