So I finally read Little Women (with spoilers)

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hell of a struggle I might add - please someone who loves it tell me why?!

Anyway, googled Good Wives to see the outcome - and how did Jo NOT marry him eventually????

I've got and have recently re-read all the Little Women stories. I must have been about 8 or 9 when I read them (annd What Katy Did) as it took me ages to twig that they were set in America. I was also bemused by shops being open on Christmas Day.

Ditto the Anne of Green Gables series but she got too prissy in the end. I preferred her in the first book . Has anyone read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm? Quite similar to Anne.

But almost (but not quite) better than Anne are the three Emily books by LMM, with the most fantastic hero, and Byronic anti-hero as well.

i would add
milly molly mandy (to soften up younger girls for lw etc)
king of the barbareens (for afterwards)

there is something so foreign about lw and katy. a pickled lime. a swing in a shed.

oh I loved Emily much more than Anne!

I wanted to be passionate Emily but thought that I was in fact imaginative Anne with her sensible streak.

But I did love Teddy much more than Gilbert, who has always seemed rather characterless to me - probably why she makes him into a hard-working doctor in the later books to keep him out of the way.

So, do I go find a copy of Good Wives to make it complete., or will my life be ok without it?

hmm never thought about it that way.

think you may be right though. probably I loved Emily so because I am so straight myself. but also because her dreamy wafting about in pine forests never seemed as...I dunno, fevered, as Anne's doomed heroines. that gave me the pip.

and I liked Emily's writing. Anne was just a dabbler, Emily meant it.

Yes, Emily very serious about her writing - always wondered if LLM was drawing on her own feelings there. I alwas though Emily was more fevered, though, with that weird 'second sight' thing, which is only hinted at with Anne. I feel that they are a bit more Gothic, which is not usually my thing, but I do love them.

Anne was my first love though; I remember crying when I realised Rainbow Valley (which I thought was a random story) was actually about Anne grown up. I went downstairs and pulled my mother out of a dinner party because I was so upset.

Now I'm going to have to read them again.

The sentimentality curdles a bit when you get older. Because it is written from a child's perspective, it works for you when you read it as a child, but comes across as overly earnest when you are grown up

Oh no, I loved Gilbert, he must have had charisma to carry off such a silly name. Poss image formed by cute guy who played him on telly (a reverse Shatner if you will). Which reminds me, has anyone seen the Anne telly mini-series where she gets arrested as a spy in the First World War? Bit off-piste for LMM methinks.

If Prof Bhaer looked like Gabriel Byrne I could sort of buy it but he didn't. He was a great guy but not Laurie.

Right. Have finished Good Wives (I am stubborn and NEEDED a proper ending )

I enjoyed it a lot more than Little Women Still felt Laurie and Amy was wrong, but Jo and Bhaer is ok iyswim.

If you are having a Little Women moment, also try 'March', it won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, telling the story from the father's perspective, with lots of slavery and American Civil War stuff thrown in. Definitely more of a grown up book, with some surprising insight into Marmee's character...