Louisa May Alcott

As a child, I loved, and reread many times, Louisa May Alcott's books: Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Under the Lilacs, and Jack and Jill. Of course Little Women and its two sequels were my favorites. I loved the strength of the girls, especially Jo; the warmth of the family scenes; the relationships among the girls; Jo's writing; the innocent but fraught romances; the pathos of Beth's illness and death; and so much more. I couldn't get enough of these books. However, when I reread some of them with my daughter, and again when I taught Little Women in a Women's Literature class, I noticed what I had mainly missed or perhaps overlooked as a child: the heavily didactic aspect of Alcott's novels. Almost every chapter in Little Women has some kind of explicit, spelled-out lesson about life: be good to those who are poor, don't hold a grudge, control your temper, don't be vain... I think Alcott felt that a book during that time period -- especially a book that was, very subtly, a bit subversive about female roles -- had to prove its moral worth through these lessons; she was probably right. Still, despite the heavyhanded didactic aspect, I will always love these books, especially Little Women.