Who, I wonder did you see yourself as: Meg, Jo, Beth or Amy? (My allegiance and empathy changed over the years with frequent re-readings.) If you are familiar with those names then you will have read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott at some point in your life. I have read it countless times, mostly before I was about 14. I still have the hard back edition with the dust jacket showing a rather rosy tinted picture of the female family gathered around a piano. I read and loved the book with almost zero understanding of the historical context. I knew nothing of the American civil war and so had only the haziest grasp of where the Father was and why he was absent and in apparent danger.
There were three subsequent books following the characters in their lives but, as usual, none of them are as vivid as the first story.
There has been quite a flurry of writers producing sequels and some prequels to various famous books written by others. For example: Death comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice by PD James; Mrs de Winter, Susan Hill’s follow up to Rebecca and also Peter Pan in Scarlet, written by Geraldine McCaughrean at the behest of Great Ormond Street Hospital. It is an attractive proposition I think. An empty piece of paper and even more so an empty mind are terrifying for any writer. To have something there already on which to build is very comforting.
Geraldine Brooks uses this idea and takes it sideways. In her book: ‘March,’ she fills in the back story of that shadowy father in Little Women. She tells me where he was and what he was doing.
Home, both real and fictional is the New England town of Concord in Massachusetts. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is heavily autobiographical with the author being only lightly disguised as Jo. Geraldine Brooks uses all the earlier writer offers her as well as the journals of the real life Bronson Alcott (the father) to mould the character of March. He is a product of both place and time, a vegetarian, a pacifist, an educator, an abolitionist. The area around Concord is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both adherents to radical new philosophies. They wanted to reconsider the nature of God and our relationship with the natural world. Some of their thoughts on what we would now call ecology would not feel too out of place today. Both Emerson and Thoreau appear in the novel as important friends of the family in Concord.
John March has the normal struggles as he goes to war as a minister of religion. His principles forbid him to kill and yet he sees others die because he refuses to forcibly intervene. He has a complicated relationship with a literate (surprisingly, as this was firmly forbidden) slave girl and in guilt and torment writes home describing a totally different and more positive experience than that through which he is living.
To the reader it comes as a shock when half way through the book the narrative is put down by March and taken up by his wife Marmee. It is a clever device used by the author to allow us to hear, and feel, firsthand the shock and anger experienced by a wife who realises she has been deceived by her husband and now has to work out how she wishes to respond.
The horrors of the civil war and the inhuman treatment of people kept as slaves is quite graphically reported and although I knew of this it still shocked. I’m not sure I can think of an adjective strong enough to describe the brutality. Possibly just as egregious is the realisation that this was only 160 years ago and The Civil Rights Act in the US was as recent as 1964. Shocking again when we know that with the Black Lives Matter movement and the incredibly divided political situation, America is still far from being a homogenous, tolerant society. The utopian idealists of 19th century Massachusetts would be appalled by the lack of progress I think. Lack of progress with racial equality and with the rights and status of women.
I have read several newspaper articles which wish to alarm and sensationalise the present political polarity but I can see that there are indeed dark echoes of civil war.
This story by Geraldine Brooks is well written and well researched. It is a good solid read that does entertain but also almost forces the reader to think deeply and consider their response to many troubling and difficult problems.
The start of a new year is a good time for a new project…and I have one! At the beginning of January I am starting a blog, bookish of course, called: BeyondTheAiringCupboard.co.uk. It will have on it the Bookends articles but there will be more. I am hoping you might like to take a look and I am hoping that you like what you find. It will explain the title I promise!
Happy New Year and happy reading.