Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

This refusal to make the final break with the past became very clear when I read Louisa M. Alcott’s Good Wives, which is a sequel to Little Women. A year or more had passed since I had left Jo and Laurie together, smiling at the future. As soon as I picked up the little paper-backed Tauchnitz edition in which their story was continued I opened it at random. I happened on a page which without warning broke the news of Laurie’s marriage to Jo’s young sister, Amy, who was blonde, vain, and stupid. I threw the book away from me as if it had burned my fingers. For several days I was absolutely crushed by a misfortune which had seemed to strike at the very roots of my being: the man I loved and by whom I had thought I was loved had betrayed me for a little goose of a girl. I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it. Later, I discovered that Jo herself had turned Laurie down.