WHY LITTLE WOMEN IS STILL BIG
Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy Anne Boyd Rioux WW Norton €27.99 ★★★★★
It’s about the sex-starved lady pygmies of the southern Malaysian desert,’ says Ronnie Barker’s Fletcher, successfully trading a copy of Little Women as filthy contraband in an episode of Porridge – just one of the range of cultural references made in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy. And it captures the comprehensive but playful approach of academic Anne Boyd Rioux to assessing the impact of Louisa May Alcott’s novel since it was first published 150 years ago.
Even if you’ve never read Little Women, the chances are you have gleaned the story – four Massachusetts sisters growing up in hardship, with their doctor father away in the Civil War – from one of the three Hollywood film versions. There’s Meg the obedient sister, Amy the vain, coquettish one, Beth the sick one, and Jo the bookish tomboy; all watched over by (effectively) single mother Marmee. Alcott’s book was a runaway success. Everyone was reading it – men as well women, boys as well as girls.
There’s a revealing overview of Alcott – a literary ‘spinster’, simultaneously dashing off raunchy Gothic thrillers under a pseudonym.
Rioux dives into why people claim to loathe or love Little Women for its ‘sentimentality’. Is it a ‘submissive’ text because the shallow Amy gets to marry Laurie, instead of Jo? Or ‘subversive’ because Alcott never wanted Jo to marry at all? Hey, Rioux reminds us, perhaps it can be both.
She unpicks why people read it again and again, and makes a powerful case for the unfairness of dropping it from school reading lists, in contrast to ‘boy-friendly’ Tom Sawyer.
Despite its downgraded literary status, famous writers as disparate as Stephen King and J K Rowling have been entranced by the book.
This delightful read had me leaping to grab Little Women and its two sequels off the bookshelf immediately.