A question about Little Women.

[CurlewKate]

That scene at the beginning where they each find a book under their pillow. What book is it? I ask because I have always thought one thing-and I discover my best bookish friend thinks something else….

I liked Meg best, but didn't like the book the way I loved the Katy books, partly because of the sneaked-in anti Irish stuff, (very transcendentalist, don't get me started on Thoreau).

Probably Amy next. Jo and Beth also-rans.

I noticed that! It is interesting. AI is terrible with questions like this though - I really notice it. It desperately wants to make connections and to assume your question must have a basis in fact, so it regularly puts two and two together and makes 49.

Interestingly, it's also wrong on details. I've just asked it (for kicks) whether the book Marmee gives to the girls is Pride and Prejudice. It says no, it's a little crimson-covered book (!), which is either Pilgrim's Progress or the Bible.

So now it knows there's a debate about whether it's PP or the Bible, but has the detail about the cover colours wrong.

^^ This. The books are New Testaments - the passage about asking for directions like Christian is about how the girls are now old enough to have their own reading copies of the only “directions” for life. They are moving on from PP as a children’s allegory, to the “true” book about Christian life (the “best life that was ever lived” is just a 19thc sentimental way of saying Christ).

You wouldn’t turn to PP for “comfort”, nor would you read or reread chapters from it every day for guidance. It would have been very odd indeed (and expensive) to have PP rebound in four different versions for your daughters. One copy for the family would certainly have been enough! Personal binding of Bibles was, however, quite an industry; and would have been thought of as a significant gift for a young person (not just as a keepsake, but a gift for future adult use).

I understood what she meant as a child; but these days I’m a 19thc historian so it seems even more obvious to me!

Agreed, but he Katy books also have their Irish stereotyping -- that scene in What Katy Did Next when Katy puts on a comedy Irish servant performance for Christmas in Nice, when she's serving cakes to Amy and her dolls, by putting on an improvised cap and apron and doing a Kerry 'brogue'. Basically servants are Irish, and Irish people are a reliable source of comedy with their funny speech.

(Mind you, the idea that Irish people = comic servants isn't exactly rare in 19thc novels. For some reason I only just noticed that in Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford spends the entire 10-mile drive to Sotherton amusing Julia Bertram with 'Irish stories' about 'ridiculous things his uncle's groom had said.'

These Substack posts about the various film adaptations are interesting, though they did remind me that I’d seen part of the 1970s version where William Shatner plays Prof Bhaer, which I’d clearly blocked from my memory 😀 This is Part 1:

Little Women Film Reviews

That Substack is great, loads to read not just about LW - thank you for sharing! Is it yours @EllieQ?

No, it’s not mine - I started following a few literary/ book focused blogs on Substack, and that article came up as suggested reading. The blog is really interesting 😊

I agree about that version being the best. I love the sequence which starts off at home with the girls singing the Land o' the Leal, and shows John leaving for the war. It's the most beautiful musical arrangement - I keep listening to it to try to sort out the harmonies,

Oh yes I love that sequence too and the music! I remember as a child reading about Land o' the Leal in the book and never knowing what the song was until I saw the BBC serial.

Weakly offers up 1949 version as favourite… So much to love…

Second (realistic) favourite Winona Ryder. Detested Florence Pugh thing - an aberration. And as for the BBC one a few years ago with the ethereal dancing - wth?

Just off to read the Substack as can’t believe I’ve missed William Shatner 😂

Great thread. Had always assumed the books were the PP, without having ever put much thought into the matter. Very clearly NT now though!

Cool. I didn't know this existed. Thank you!

March by Geraldine James won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.
I remember reading it and feeling that it fleshed out Mr March and how could he basically abandon his family for what. I can't vouch for it being a good/bad book 20 years on. I would have been deep in the baby years. My 18 year old has just read it and worked her way round who she didn't and then did like. Amy was her ultimate choice. I guess it was the Hogwarts house choice of the 19th C.
I need to reread the whole lot. Maybe February is the time!
Waves at @SarahAndQuack and a few others I think I recognise from when it was just fields.

Noooo - no MN Royalty, please! It may have been fields, but as one who was here when the first few picks were sunk into the sod, I remain scarred by the waving and shrieking when certain posters turned up, à la a US sitcom.

Sorry for deviation!

Sorry @MaturingCheeseball got caught up in nostalgia for when we have read these books and how that differs across different stages. The books we read at certain points burn bright, hence our PP / NewT recoil, the books I read in my 30s/40s less so.
I must say I bloody love the internet. It means we can pull up biogs, calculate dates, eras, disagree, reflect.
Jo March would have had multiple blogs, churning through platforms.
Amy would be curated on Instagram but worried she'd missed the boat with tik tock.
Mr March would be disappearing down you-tube holes.
Beth would be alive

Marmie such an Instagrammer #Mumofgirls posing her perfect daughters and her cottagecore life whilst hiding the cook/cleaner .

Those on this thread might be interested to hear about this forthcoming book which seems
to be a modern reworking of Little Women. I don’t know if I approve or not! www.penguin.co.uk/books/471495/all-grown-up-by-buchanan-daisy/9781529963052

Ooh... not sure.
I read "Darling" by India Knight (I know, I know, awful IK - but I enjoyed "My Life on a Plate" and "Don't You Want Me?") which is a modern reworking of "The Pursuit of Love" and thought I'd lap it up.
It was okay but everything was too consciously substituted, iykwim, just to show it was modern.
Obviously different authors treat things differently and I'm sure I'll buy "All Grown Up" but I'll be wary...

Ok, um ... I don't think I recognise names very well, and I've only been posting under this name for a few years, not very prolifically. I have really nice memories of lovely conversations with people over the years and I was thinking how good those memories were. I feel a bit slapped down, although I don't know if @BookEngine is even right that we've crossed paths or not (and it seemed to me purely a nice possibility until you posted).

I'm all muddled up and nostalgic with Sarah and Duck from c 2013 now!

My 18 year old DD, recent Little Women reader, said she found the preachy bits excruciating as I'm sure we all did when we first read it.

I have threatened to just buy her and her sister a single, nicely bound religious text for Christmas. My neighbours might be very embarrassed to have our Xmas breakfast of choice - Coco pops to start from Father Christmas, followed by salmon bagels foist upon them.

Well, obviously I love Sarah and Duck! I used to watch it with DD while she fell asleep on my chest, and now she is rising nine she will still occasionally request it when she's feeling ill.

I'm sure it's really boring, but I liked MN back in the day; I really loved the conversations and the feeling of getting to know people who were on the same page. This thread does feel like that. It's not a bad thing.

I have always thought it was The New Testament and reading a chapter at a time was what I did as a child.

Someone mentioned Brides carrying bibles, I do remember seeing a Bride carrying a bible back in 1970, it was the first wedding I went to that I remember as a 4 year old, a white one with quite a long white satin ribbon as a marker.

I visited The Alcott family home when I was in America many years ago, it was really meaningful to me as I loved the book so much as a child and I remember seeing where the sisters had written on the walls, protected by Perspex.

I loved these books, sermons included. (Nice to have been so cared about.) I did wonder things though, like what did Beth actually die of, and how could she have forgotten Pip the canary when she was home all the time, and what did they do with the old piano (give it to the Hummels?) and who was the little grand daughter old Mr Laurence loved (Laurie's sister? Cousin?) and did children ever eat pickled limes and how could Beth drop mittens out of her bedroom window for poor children in the street when the house was clearly set in a garden in countryside suburbs. I liked Amy best. She tried so hard.

I was totally befuddled by the pickled limes. I also first had a copy that was abridged, and for some reason referred to them exclusively as “pickles” instead. The only American “pickle” I had encountered was gherkins, so I spent a lot of time bemusedly imagining that Amy’s schoolfriends were trading pickled gherkins as a delicacy, which totally confused me. To be honest, the pickled limes don’t sound better - I could sort of imagine why gherkins might be enjoyable, but not the limes! (I did once read a blog where someone made them to see what they were like, and said they were actually quite nice, though!)

Re Beth, scarlet fever in the pre-antibiotic age often caused rheumatic fever, an autoimmune inflammatory disease that in a few people develops after having initially recovered from scarlet fever. It causes joint pain, weakness, fatigue and heart damage, and in severe cases becomes rheumatic heart disease, which weakens the heart muscle and causes heart failure. I assume that Beth actually died of heart failure, which was difficult to treat at that time as there’s no effective cure for rheumatic fever and certainly at the time they would not have had any way of treating that kind of heart failure.

Scarlet fever is caused by a bacterium rather than a virus, so these days just an ordinary course of antibiotics prevents patients from going on to develop rheumatic fever and heart damage. Occasionally it pops up as a disease even today - my DD actually got it when she was about five, when there was a surge in cases. We were just prescribed ordinary penicillin for seven days. If you mention it people always say “oh it’s what Beth died of in Little Women!” But essentially it’s just a form of strep A tonsillitis, where the Strep bacterium has been infected by a bacteriophage that causes an immune reaction in the patient (the characteristic strawberry skin rash). These days super treatable — let’s hope antibiotic resistance doesn’t in the future take away our ability to treat childhood diseases like scarlet fever!

Thank you so much, catinateacup. That's really interesting. It sounds like the effects were similar to Still's Disease (Rosemary Sutcliffe suffered from this as a child and it affected her all her life).
Agree we are very lucky to be able to treat with antibiotics now, and also vaccines. Shall never forget having childhood measles back to back with whooping cough. Think it knocked my immune system flat for a year or two. Chilblains also seem to be a thing of the past.

I'm still baffled by pickled limes, despite having lime pickle in the 'fridge. They sound slightly nautical.