“Stick to your teaching; you can’t write.” – advice given to LM Alcott
I didn’t quite do what I had intended to do tonight. I blame Louisa May Alcott. I also blame her most recent editor. I just wanted to take a look inside Daniel Shealy’s annotated edition of Little Women (The Belknap Press, 2013), but I found myself taking another look and a bit more of a look and then just turn a few more pages and then most of the evening was gone. My work is still to be done, but I had a lovely time. The fact that I had a lovely time even with a migraine says a lot about the joy that Little Women has given me since I was a child, but it also suggests that Shealy’s done a good job.
It’s a big book. Almost a coffee table book. The size is well-used, however, as it contains a great deal of good stuff, mostly well-presented. My main caveat is that the red of the notations is quite hard to read for people with eyesight problems (which made tonight the perfect evening to attempt it, in fact, for I demonstrated that red=eyestrain quite conclusively) and that I wish Shealy hadn’t silently corrected some textual errors. He explains at the beginning that he’s only doing this for really obvious errors, but I wish he had given us just a few pages more of annotations, so that I could know where his edition departs from the base edition/s he chose. I'm fussy about my critical editions, I guess.
Apart from this and the randomness of which flowers so carefully defined in the annotations get illustrations (they’re always ones I know and never the ones I want to know) this is a really wonderful book. And that’s the short form of the review. All the rest of this post is me enjoying a good book. All the typos are brought to you by my migraine, which is still with me, albeit in abated form.
One of the magic elements of this edition is that it shows us the lives of the March sisters, and runs the lives of the Alcott sisters alongside in fascinating counterpoint. The annotations and the introduction and the pictures all combine to provide insights into Alcott’s family and life and the American memory of her, and to reflect them through Alcott’s novel. We get to see May’s art grow into something almost respectable (which was a clever addition – showing us the art of the sister who provided the first illustrations for Little Women) from something that was sweet but not quite there.
Shealy has also included several paintings by Rockwell. My favourite is one of Jo-as-writer, for it’s almost identical with the mental picture I had of Jo-as-writer when I was child and imagining myself in that attic, inventing madly. Later I had a more deskbound version in my mind, and I have yet to find an artist who has seen that in the same way, but Rockwell’s picture is my Jo, with my dreams: this was a book I needed to have in my life, just to discover this fact.
The element of this volume that gave me the most relief was that Shealy spelled out the links with Pilgrim’s Progress. I know it’s wrong of me, but I find Pilgrims’ Progress prosy and dull and I’ve always wanted to know the links between it and Little Women, but I dislike it so intensely that I didn’t actually want to read it again to find out. That work has been done and I can just read about those links, safely one step removed from Bunyan.
Something else that leaps out at me is how much this volume can be useful to a writer. To any writer. Alcott’s experience in publishing and the decisions she made and the advice she was given is documented. What’s most interesting is that it breaks with some common advice given now. She was following the advice of her publisher when she wrote Little Women, and it wasn’t until she finished the first volume that her hart was fully engaged. It shows in the writing, I think, but it’s interesting to know that she was pushed into it.
It’s just as interesting to discover that she didn’t believe in the obedient and silent female: for her women ought to work and ought to think. She married all her March sisters off reluctantly, because society wanted romance in its fiction*.
There is so much in this volume. I want to go through and make a list of the popular literature mentioned in the annotations, for instance, and find out more about forgotten writers. I want to haul out more quotes (all as dramatic as the advice given of Alcott that I used as the title for this). I want…I want… to sit down and read the whole thing again, this time not skipping anything.
PS Canberrans (or anyone who feels like a small journey here): if you want to celebrate me falling in love (for the umpteenth time) with Little Women, I am thinking of having a Little Women dinner in late July. I’ll rustle out recipes that are correct for that place and time, we’ll all cook and eat and what else we do (read, watch a movie, chat, play period games) is entirely up to us.
*This is what happened to me in Cellophane. Beta readers found that it was not complete without romance. We expect relationships in books. Nothing new. Good to know, however, that one is not alone.
It’s a big book. Almost a coffee table book. The size is well-used, however, as it contains a great deal of good stuff, mostly well-presented. My main caveat is that the red of the notations is quite hard to read for people with eyesight problems (which made tonight the perfect evening to attempt it, in fact, for I demonstrated that red=eyestrain quite conclusively) and that I wish Shealy hadn’t silently corrected some textual errors. He explains at the beginning that he’s only doing this for really obvious errors, but I wish he had given us just a few pages more of annotations, so that I could know where his edition departs from the base edition/s he chose. I'm fussy about my critical editions, I guess.
Apart from this and the randomness of which flowers so carefully defined in the annotations get illustrations (they’re always ones I know and never the ones I want to know) this is a really wonderful book. And that’s the short form of the review. All the rest of this post is me enjoying a good book. All the typos are brought to you by my migraine, which is still with me, albeit in abated form.
One of the magic elements of this edition is that it shows us the lives of the March sisters, and runs the lives of the Alcott sisters alongside in fascinating counterpoint. The annotations and the introduction and the pictures all combine to provide insights into Alcott’s family and life and the American memory of her, and to reflect them through Alcott’s novel. We get to see May’s art grow into something almost respectable (which was a clever addition – showing us the art of the sister who provided the first illustrations for Little Women) from something that was sweet but not quite there.
Shealy has also included several paintings by Rockwell. My favourite is one of Jo-as-writer, for it’s almost identical with the mental picture I had of Jo-as-writer when I was child and imagining myself in that attic, inventing madly. Later I had a more deskbound version in my mind, and I have yet to find an artist who has seen that in the same way, but Rockwell’s picture is my Jo, with my dreams: this was a book I needed to have in my life, just to discover this fact.
The element of this volume that gave me the most relief was that Shealy spelled out the links with Pilgrim’s Progress. I know it’s wrong of me, but I find Pilgrims’ Progress prosy and dull and I’ve always wanted to know the links between it and Little Women, but I dislike it so intensely that I didn’t actually want to read it again to find out. That work has been done and I can just read about those links, safely one step removed from Bunyan.
Something else that leaps out at me is how much this volume can be useful to a writer. To any writer. Alcott’s experience in publishing and the decisions she made and the advice she was given is documented. What’s most interesting is that it breaks with some common advice given now. She was following the advice of her publisher when she wrote Little Women, and it wasn’t until she finished the first volume that her hart was fully engaged. It shows in the writing, I think, but it’s interesting to know that she was pushed into it.
It’s just as interesting to discover that she didn’t believe in the obedient and silent female: for her women ought to work and ought to think. She married all her March sisters off reluctantly, because society wanted romance in its fiction*.
There is so much in this volume. I want to go through and make a list of the popular literature mentioned in the annotations, for instance, and find out more about forgotten writers. I want to haul out more quotes (all as dramatic as the advice given of Alcott that I used as the title for this). I want…I want… to sit down and read the whole thing again, this time not skipping anything.
PS Canberrans (or anyone who feels like a small journey here): if you want to celebrate me falling in love (for the umpteenth time) with Little Women, I am thinking of having a Little Women dinner in late July. I’ll rustle out recipes that are correct for that place and time, we’ll all cook and eat and what else we do (read, watch a movie, chat, play period games) is entirely up to us.
*This is what happened to me in Cellophane. Beta readers found that it was not complete without romance. We expect relationships in books. Nothing new. Good to know, however, that one is not alone.
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