Little Women / Good Wives - do you think Laurie still loved Jo, or Jo loved Laurie, when they married other people?

Do you remember when Mrs March called Jo in from the garden "Jo! I want you!" and Laurie overhead, and he longed to call out the same only with such a different meaning and his heart broke

What happened to Dan? He was in prison but I forget what else - did he die?

I like to think Amy would really have turned Laurie down, stayed in Paris and become a sort of early Coco Chanel (minus the Nazi bit) and designed fantastic arty clothes. I can believe Jo enjoying the writing and enjoying being a mum/schoolteacher to a houseful of boys, but I just don't really find Amy convincing as a mum and wife, even though probably it's quite realistic for the time.

Now Dan and Bess really couldn't have made each other happy, sadly.

They couldn't have been together: they just couldn't. Sometimes it's not right to be with your soulmate: sometimes you're just too close, and know each other too well

I will never get over it. NEVER.

And yes, to the poster who wrote about Dan.

Laurie was a bit weak, foppish and arrogant when he proposed. She might have been good for him but he wouldn't have been good for her.

These books are buggers to read aloud though...I had to rehearse Beths expiration to manage to just about choke it out; I thought I was safe with Little Men, forgotten about poor old John Brooke.

But I think Jo and Laurie could have made each other happy (which I assume Liz and Rich didn't, given the old divorces plural). The problem was that she was 'headstrong' (read: had opinions) and was not so adept at 'managing him' (read: had opinions).

And she makes out that Jo is fine with it.
not quite, Jo was a bit mopey till the Prof showed up again. Although I think her affection for Laurie was never really anything more than sisterly.

Dan. Jo's Boys and little men are the best sequels ever.

I will search it out MI.

Heathcliff? Bleugh.

I can't watch the films, they just aren't done the way I remember it through reading it. My most favourite books of a certain age, they really were.

I was most disappointed that Jo and Laurie never got together, didn't much care for Beth and thought Meg was a bit of wuss. Amy, don't get me started, spoilt nasty and unpleasant little girl who got some comeuppance, but not enough. I truly loved Jo, she was cool and couldn't give a stuff. In this generation Jo and Laurie would have been the Liz and Rich of their time. They were too fiery and passionate for childrens books, but I think of them as the Heathcliff and Cathy with their passion...........

Oh the book, I so hope dd is a fan, have got them on my kindle as I loved them so much, I thought I loved Wuthering Heights but nothing compares to my love of the Alcott Novels.

I couldn't abide Amy, especially when she suddenly developed a personality overseas with laurie.

Completely agree that Jo and the prof were happy and that laurie only settled for amy.

much later in the books... i was madly in love with Dan. I still cry over Dan and the american indians. still.

Oh yes, it's a great essay (at least I think it's that one, not sure where it is at the moment); it's called 'Alison's Giggle' and it ranges from Chaucer to what Carter calls the 'twanging sexuality' underpinning Jane Austen's writing.

Someone mentioned Alan Rickman??? Awwwwwww....

I am sorry but CD's face was too big for Beth

MI That Angela Carter essay sounds fantastic!

The book does not specify whether or not she fancied the arse off him (though clearly she must have done - whilst one might have a hard time choosing between Greg Wise and Rickers, one would have absolutely no trouble whatsoever selecting the yummy Colonel over the dastardly Willoughby. And personally I would vote Rickers.)

And frankly the Prof ain't no Colonel. He's a well-meaning chap but definitely second prize.

tribpot
i absolutely agree.

What does not sit well is not so much that Laurie and Amy marry (tonnes of marriages were based on families knowing each other, suitability determined by others, making the best of it, no-one left, settling for sister when prime love interest dies etc etc). It is that LMA presents Laurie and Amy as a lovematch. Which is ridiculous. And she makes out that Jo is fine with it. Which is equally ridiculous.

True, but for that willoughby I could and would have switched off my very acute and accurate fuckwit radar. I suppose a three way would have played hell with the film's U certificate.

I don't think Jo does want to shag Laurie, though. She obviously does like young, pretty blokes because Meg tells her off for chatting to them instead of making decorous small-talk on house visits. I think she just found Laurie wet.

(Not that I'm over-invested here, oh no.)

It would take me precisely five seconds to have been ripping that particular Colonel's trousers off...

Yeah but the Prof wasn't really Gabriel Byrne. A young Gabriel Byrne (swoon) would have been Laurie.

Jo and Laurie were destined for each other but they would have clashed because they both had a temper. Well, so friggin what. In Alcott's era this could never make for a happy marriage (where, whatever she wrote, the husband had to be In Charge). And I believe it's widely thought as well that as she was Jo, she 'punished' herself for not being womanly enough by denying 'herself' her soul mate (will go and look for some slightly more academic reference to this than my hazy memory of same).

It's clearly bollocks that, having loved Jo for c. 10 years, Laurie can just 'get over himself' and truly fall in love with Amy - although she is a more suitable wife for him. It would have been more honest of Alcott to have married them in a way similar to Marianne Dashwood (who gets extra-swoony Alan Rickman) who forms a marriage based on "no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship" and then grows to love him over time.

Hmm. It's a bit Middlemarchy, isn't it (bear with me, I am only just working this out) in reverse. And in MM the main woman marries the pretty young bloke and lots of critics have said 'oh how unsatisfying' and then the late great Angela Carter points out (I am not sure where, it may be in a fabulous collection of essays called, get this, 'The Left and the Erotic' published at some point in the 1980 when I was young) that, well, she wants to shag him and frankly lots of strong-minded women want to shag pretty blokes

Obviously Bhaer is not Casaubon, and I quite like him, but then I suspect I would find him a bit young for me now

I read somewhere that LMA never intended Laurie to be the Big Love Interest he became once the first volume was published.

She was pissed off that readers (the early shippers!) were determined for Jo and Laurie to marry, so she deliberately set out to thwart people's expectations. Hence the frankly off relationship with the Prof and the all too convenient pairing of Amy and Laurie which -short of death - was a really quick way to say, "fucking forget Jo and Laurie, ain't never gonna hapoen, not whilst I am in charge!"

chub - brilliant!

swan, who's her biography by? I'd like to get a good one, she must have been an interesting woman.