Little Women and The Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays [reprint ed.] 1135593183, 9781135593186

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LITTLE WOMEN AND

THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND CULTURE VOLUME 6 GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES VOLUME 1974

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND CULTURE JACK

ZIPES,

Series Editor

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

RETELLING STORIES,

COMES OF AGE

FRAMING CULTURE

Toward a New Aesthetic by Maria Nikolajeva

Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum

REDISCOVERIES IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

by Suzanne Rahn REGEN DERING THE SCHOOL STORY

Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys by Beverly Lyon Clark WHITE SUPREMACY IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Characterizations of African Americans, I830-I900 by Donnarae MacCann

THE CASE OF PETER RABBIT

Changing Conditions of Literature for Children by Margaret Mackey LITTLE WOMEN AND

THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays edited by Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark

LITTLE WOMEN AND

THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION CRITICISM, CONTROVERSY, PERSONAL ESSAYS

EDITED BY

JANICE

M.

ALBERGHENE

BEVERLY LYON CLARK

~l Routledge ~~

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1999 by Garland Publishing, Inc. Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 1999 by Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Little women and the feminist imagination : criticism, controversy, personal essays / edited by Janice M. Alberghene amd Beverly Lyon Clark. p. cm. - (Children's literature and culture ; vol. 6. Garland reference library of the humanities; vol. 1974.) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888. Little women. 2. Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888-Political and social views. 3. Feminism and, literatureNew England-History-19th century. 4. Children's stories, AmericanHistory and criticism. 5. Domestic fiction, American-History and critiI. Alberghene, Janice M. II. Clark, cism. 6. Young women in literature.

Beverly Lyon. 1974.

III. Series: Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol.

IV. Series: Garland reference library of the humanities.

Children's

literature and culture ; v. 6. PSI017.L53L68

1999

813'A-DC21

98-26670 CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-815-32049-4 (hbk)

FOR DAVID AND HARPER, AND IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER

-J.A. FOR ROGER, ADAM, AND WENDY

-B.C.

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CONTENTS

Xl

GENERAL EDITOR'S

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Xv

INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD

Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark 3

CARTOON-LITTLE

MARMEE FACE

WOMEN:

LIFE

MEG, AMY,

BETH, Jo

AND

IN THE' 80S

Victoria Roberts 7

WAITING TOGETHER:

ALCOTT

ON

MATRIARCHY

Nina Auerbach 27

LITTLE

WOMEN:

ALCOTT'S

CIVIL WAR

Judith Fetterley 43

INTRODUCTION TO

LITTLE

WOMEN

Ann Douglas 63

READING

FOR

LOVE:

AND WHISTLING Jo

CANONS, PARACANONS, MARCH

Catharine R. Stimpson 83

"THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THINGS FAMILIES

IN LITTLE

Elizabeth Lennox Keyser

WOMEN

IN ALL THE WORLD"?

97

PORTRAYING

LITTLE

WOMEN

THROUGH THE AGES

Anne Hollander 103

GETTING LITTLE

COZY WITH

A CLASSIC: VISUALIZING

(1868-1995)

WOMEN

Susan R. Gannon 139

"QUEER PERFORMANCES": IN LITTLE

LESBIAN POLITICS

WOMEN

Roberta Seelinger Trites 161

MEN AND (MALE)

LITTLE

NOTES

WOMEN:

OF

A RESISTING

READER

Jan Susina 173

IN

Jo's

GARRET:

LITTLE

AND THE

WOMEN

SPACE

OF IMAGINATION

Sue Standing 185

"A

POWER

IN THE

HOUSE":

THE ARCHITECTURE

OF

LITTLE

WOMEN

AND

INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION

David H. Watters 213

THE

PROPHETS

MISSIONARIES

AND THE MARTYRS: IN

LITTLE

WOMEN

PILGRIMS

AND JACK

AND

AND JILL

Anne K. Phillips 237

A

GREATER HAPPINESS:

UTOPIA IN

LITTLE

SEARCHING

FOR

FEMINIST

WOMEN

Kathryn Manson Tomasek 261

TRANSATLANTIC TRANSLATIONS: OF EDUCATION

IN ALCOTT AND

COMMUNITIES BRONTE

Christine Doyle 285

LEARNING ALCOTT'S

FROM

Susan Laird

Vlll

MARMEE'S

RESPONSE TO

CON TEN T S

TEACHING:

GIRLS'

MISEDUCATION

323

SONGS

TO AGING

CHILDREN:

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT'S

MARCH TRILOGY

Michelle A. Masse 347

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE OF INTERPRETATION: AND

THE

LIVING

Is

ON

BOUNDARIES

READING

LITTLE

WOMEN

EASY

Janice M. Alberghene 377

ALCOTT

IN JAPAN: A

SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aiko Moro-oka 381

SELECTED AND

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ALCOTT

CRITICISM

Beverly Lyon Clark and Linnea Hendrickson 421

CONTRIBUTORS

425

INDEX

BIOGRAPHY

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SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD

Dedicated to furthering original research in children's literature and culture, the Children's Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children's literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children's literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through late adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children's literature, this Garland series is particularly concerned with transformations in children's culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children's literature, all types of studies that deal with children's radio, film, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children's culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children's culture in the last fifty years, but there have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children's literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to many people for leads to Alcott references and other Alcottiana. We would especially like to thank Wendy Betts, Terri Butler, Tara Calishain, Patsy Cumming, Marya DeVoto, Christine Doyle, Monica Edinger, Rebecca Ferris, Sue Gannon, Clia and Paul Goodwin, Marcia Grimes, Tina Hanlon, Linnea Hendrickson, Karen Hiller, Saeko Ikemoto, Sylvia Iskander, Dee Jones, Elizabeth Keyser, Keiko Kondo, Susan Laird, Millicent Lenz, Ellen F. Liman, Frinde Maher, Alexia Meyers, Martha Mitchell, Marcia Moss, Lissa Paul, Daniel Shealy, Betsy Shirley, Laureen Tedesco, Kay Vandergrift, David Watters, Donna White, Naomi Wood, Denise Anton Wright, Andrew Zercie-and Michael Joseph, not least for managing the "Children's Literature: Criticism and Theory" online list. We also owe a special debt to D. Michael Alberghene for graphic design and computer expertise in reproducing the Roberts cartoon. Marilyn Todesco and Karen McCaie provided superb secretarial support and Nancy Kelly loaned both her computer and her expertise at one critical juncture. Janice Alberghene thanks the Division of Graduate and Continuing Education at Fitchburg State College for the research grant which helped launch this project; further thanks go to the college for the sabbatical year which helped bring the book to completion.

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INTRODUCTION Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark

I have read and re-read "Little Women" and it never seems to grow old. -Jane Addams (1876) At the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls' stories-"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little Women" and "An OldFashioned Girl. " -Theodore Roosevelt (1913) I identified myself passionately with Jo . ... [S]he was much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books. -Simone de Beauvoir (1958) Having re-read [Little Women and Good Wives], dried my eyes and blown my nose . .. , I resolved that the only honorable course was to come out into the open and admit that the dreadful books are masterpieces. I do it, however, with some bad temper and hundreds of reservations. -Brigid Brophy (1965) I read and reread it-to the point where I read nothing else for about two years and could tell you in exactly what context any line quoted from the book came. -Isabelle Holland (1980) I read Little Women a thousand times. Ten thousand. -Cynthia Ozick (1982)

It was the first book I read in English and I loved it. I wept like a crocodile.. .. -Juris Jurjevics (1982)

... Little Women. That's where I learned that although it's very nice to have two clean gloves, it's even more important to have a little ink on your fingers. -Miss Manners (1986) From the immediacy, the authority, with which Frank Merrill's familiar illustrations of Little Women came to my mind as soon as I asked myself what a woman writing looks like, I know that Jo March must have had real influence upon me when I was a young scribbler. I am sure she has influenced many girls, for she is not, like most "real" authors, either dead or inaccessibly famous; nor, like so many artists in books, is she set apart by sensitivity or suffering or general superlativity; nor is she, like most authors in novels, male. She is close as a sister and common as grass. -Ursula K. Le Guin (1988)

Jo has given generations of readers like . .. me permission to try to become what we wished. She has helped us to recognize-and to live with, knowing we're not alone-the conflict between the writer's need for solitude and self-absorption and the yearning for the warmth of love. -Gail Mazur (1988) Where else . .. could we have read about an all-female group who discussed work, art, and all the Great Questions-or found girls who wanted to be women and not vice versa?

-Gloria Steinem (1992) The whole thing is like a horror movie to me.

-Camille Paglia (1994) I understood what it was like being the outsider. ... I didn't identify with

Beth and all the others. ... They were too formal, and they were the women you expected them to be, but Jo broke the mold. -Sonia Sanchez (1994) I felt as though I was part of Jo and she was part of me.

-Ann Petry (1994) xvi

I N T ROD U C T ION

Little Women changed my life. -Anna Quindlen (1994)

I, personally, am Jo March, and if her author Louisa May Alcott had a whole new life to live for the sole pursuit of talking me out of it, she could not. -Barbara Kingsolver (1995)

I guess I've read Little Women more than once but I mean that's a classic. -Rachel of Friends (1997) To engage with Little Women is to engage with the feminist imagination. There's the text itself, with its four sisters embodying four models of femininity, possibly even four models of feminism, four ways of authorizing the self. Pretty Meg longs for finery, longs to embellish the self, tempted by the ways of the newly emerging social-economic elite. Spoiled Amy expresses herself through her art, rambunctious 10 through her writing. Shy Beth is so fully self-effacing that she dies, yet she too has had an outlet for self-expression, through her music. All four learn to suppress the more suspect forms of self-expression, or perhaps to reach a balance between self-expression and service to others. Although feminists have generally been most fully engaged by 10, the other sisters also play out themes that feminists still struggle with. Beyond the text, there's the author, who often elided the boundaries between herself and 10, between the Alcotts and the Marches, a continuity between text and author that some versions of feminism would endorse. Alcott's sisters Anna, Elizabeth, and May correspond, more or less closely, to Meg, Beth, and Amy. Elizabeth, like Beth, died young. May, like Amy, was a painter. And of course Alcott shared 10's hopes and desires, even if, unlike 10, she never married, never gave up writing to run a school. Instead, she gave up teaching kindergarten in order to turn to writing-though, in another sense, she never fully gave up teaching either. Finally there are the readers. Many generations of women-scholars and otherwise-have grown up with 10. In recent years, adults looking back on their childhood reading have often enacted a central feminist debate, that between a liberal-feminist ideal of autonomy and a cultural-feminist ideal of connectedness. Some argue that 10 provides a model of independence, even if she ultimately capitulates to marriage; others, that she embodies a sense of connectedness with a community of women. Some argue that she submits to prevailing cultural norms; others, that she contests them; others still, that she negotiates among competing norms. xvii

Engagement with Little Women has always been complex because of its contradictions-because of the way it dramatizes competing cultural norms. One way of staging the complexities of engagement with Little Women is to chart the way the popular imagination and the critical imagination have responded to the book, sometimes distinctly, sometimes in overlapping ways. THE POPULAR IMAGINATION In 1986 the Ladies' Home Journal declared Louisa May Alcott one of the twenty-five most important women in U.S. history, one of only three authors listed: "Little women are people, too," the editors announce. I A year later Little Women was one of the six works of classic American literature on which the Journal based a series of recipes, serving up not just Tom Sawyer's catfish and Captain Ahab's chowder but the Marches' gingersnaps and apple turnovers.2 In 1993 the U.S. post office produced a twenty-nine-cent stamp featuring a scene from Little Women, and Giorgio Armani was offering a perfume called "JO."3 In 1994 a major film version of Little Women was released-to notable acclaim, even if, according to the popular press, women outnumbered male moviegoers an unprecedented three to one, and many teenage girls no longer feel that Alcott speaks to them. 4 In 1995 an unpublished Alcott thriller, A Long Fatal Love Chase, appeared with considerable fanfare, a multimillion-dollar deal: in October it briefly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Stephen King, reviewing A Long Fatal Love Chase for the New York Times Book Review, found the tale quite good, though ultimately not as good as Little Women. 5 The year 1997 saw the publication of yet another previously unpublished manuscript, Alcott's first novel, The Inheritance, followed soon after by a made-for-TV movie. Alcott and Little Women continue to figure prominently in popular culture. Certainly it has made its imprint on consumer culture. T-shirts and bookbags, samplers and sachet dolls, not to mention puzzles, magnets, notecards, posters, diaries, and reproductions of Alcott's mood pillow are all available in the Orchard House ("Home of the Alcotts") gift shop. Alcott is also the only woman author profiled in the card game Authors, and she makes a cameo appearance-"What Louisa May Alcott novel is subtitled Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy?"-in the game Trivial Pursuit. 6 Then there are the dolls. The Ashton-Drake Galleries advertise their Little Women set, by award-winning artist Wendy Lawton, not just in collectors' journals such as the Doll Reader but in advertising inserts in the Sunday newspapers of midsize cities; Little Women dolls are available from Effanbee, Robin Woods, and the New England Cloth Doll Company as welJ.7 xviii

INTRODUCTION

And the 100th Anniversary Collection catalog for Madame Alexander, the queen of American dollmakers, features Meg March as one of the nine dolls pictured-Meg, presumably, because she was a party girl: her "feminine party-dress, trimmed with pearl, applique and delicate ribbon roses, is perfect for the ball. Hair bows of ribbon and pearl, and taffeta slippers make her the perfect Little Woman."8 Little Women dolls were among the first that Madame Alexander created, with the assistance of her three younger sisters (maybe that's why her firm features Meg). During her career she presumably designed more than 125 sets of Little Women dolls. 9 The 1949 dolls, together with some of the 1955 clothing, have now been given new life as paper dolls, joining paper dolls designed by Rachel Taft Dixon, Janet Nason, Helen Page, Tayva Patch, and Tom Tierney.lo The release of the 1994 film has added further impetus-and imagery-to the Alcott phenomenon. There are the merchandising tie-ins, of course: the Crabtree and Evelyn basket that comes with a copy of Little Women, the costume jewelry at JC Penney, the Lanz Little Women nightgowns,u There are the American Library Association's poster and bookmarks-"Cozy Up with a Classic"-featuring actresses from the movie. 12 Accounts of Alcott appeared with greater than usual frequency in the media in late 1994 and early 1995, usually with an allusion to the film.13 When media critic Caryn James published her account of preferring Amy to Jo in the New York Times Book Review-on the day of the film's release-the Times received a deluge of letters. 14 As Barbara Sicherman points out in her account of popular response to Little Women, middle-class girls ranging from M. Carey Thomas and Jane Addams to Simone de Beauvoir often found validation, in Alcott's work, of their ambitions for independence and achievement. IS So too, as Elaine Showalter points out, did such writers as Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich. 16 On the other hand, immigrants such as Elizabeth G. Stern and Mary Antinor Juris Jurjevics or Leo Lerman--devoured the book to learn how to become more American, which is to say more American middle class, more a part of the American family, if you will, rather than less. 17 Or as composer Charles Ives noted, Alcott "leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy New England childhood days-pictures which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children-pictures that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middleaged America needs nowadays more than we care to admit. "18 Certainly Little Women has been frequently mentioned-and continues to be-when famous people are polled about their favorite childhood reading. In an American Library Association compendium of statements by children's authors and illustrators regarding the effects of childhood reading, xix

four of those included mention the impact of Little Women. 19 A survey of book editors yielded our introductory epigraph by Jurjevics; a survey of prominent writers, that by Miss Manners; a publication by the National Council of Teachers of English, that by writer Isabelle Holland.20 In other surveys Gloria Steinem lists Little Women as her favorite childhood book, as did a staff writer for Country Living, and two out of the three women governors in 1989.21 Or consider lists of recommended children's books. Little Women is recommended in accounts ranging from an 1890 essay by the British Edward Salmon, to a 1912 list in the Crisis by Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset, to the 1939 What Shall the Children Read? by children's author Laura E. Richards, to the influential 1958 A Parent's Guide to Children's Reading by Nancy Larrick and the 1990 revised edition of Betsy Hearne's Choosing Books for Children. 22 It's symptomatic that in the first edition, in 1909, of the Children's Catalog: A Guide to the Best Reading for Young People Based on Twenty-Four Selected Library Lists, cataloguing some three thousand books, Alcott is accorded twenty-three entries-compared to three for Mark Twain, twelve for Charles Dickens, and three for Lewis Carroll,23 In fact, as early as 1871, three years after Little Women appeared, the New York Times could refer to Alcott as someone "whose name has already become a household word among little people. "24 By 1875 a reviewer in the Independent could refer to Little Women as a "perfect success. [Alcott] will be remembered by it when we are all in our graves and unborn generations will laugh over its tempting pages. "25 In the same year a writer for Harper's Monthly, in an essay called "Concord Books," could note that Alcott "took the public heart by storm six years ago" and is now "established as a prime favorite with old and young.... Not Miss Burney, not Mrs. Stowe, not Bret Harte, after the appearance of the Heathen Chinee, ever received the adulation that has been poured out at Miss Alcott's feet by a host of enthusiastic juveniles. And the seniors are not much more moderate."26 Two decades later Frank Preston Stearns would recall, "Grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way down town in the morning said to each other, 'Have you read "Little Women"'; and laughed as they said it. The clerks in my office read it, so also did the civil engineer, and the boy in the elevator. It was the rage in '69 as 'Pinafore' was in '78."27 By 1880, according to the New York Times, Alcott was "generally regarded as the most popular and successful literary woman in America. "28 When she died in 1888, obituaries appeared in periodicals ranging from the British Athenaeum to the Ladies' Home Journal, from the Chautauquan to the Critic to Cosmopolitan. 29 A notice of her funeral appeared on the front page of the New York Times. 30 And Ednah Cheney'S xx

I N T ROD U C T ION

compilation of Alcott's letters and journals was widely and copiously reviewed in Britain and America-in the Academy, the Athenaeum, the At-

lantic, Blackwood's, Cosmopolitan, Literary World, the Nation, the Spectator. 31 In 1901 Mary Tracy Earle could say of Little Men, "probably no other book excepting Little Women has been so much read by children. "32 By 1918 The Cambridge History of American Literature could refer to Alcott's work, in a chapter on "Books for Children," as "the notable success of the period," and as still having "the most assured position" among contemporary books for children. 33 So it's not surprising that in an 1893 poll of librarians, and again in a 1922 poll of librarians and educators, Little Women headed the list of those considered children's favorites. 34 In a 1927 poll reported in the New York Times, high school students were asked, "What book has interested you most?" Their top choice-to the consternation of the headline writer-was not the Bible but Little Women. 3S But it's not just polls that reveal the popularity of the book. In 1912 the Cleveland public library needed 325 copies of Little Women to satisfy the constant demand; the New York City branch libraries, more than a thousand. 36 Even in 1968 Little Women was one of the two most circulated books in the New York City Public Library.37 In part this popularity reflects a certain institutionalizing of Alcott, especially in the schools and libraries. It's no accident that, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Little, Brown and Company-the successors to Roberts Brothers, and still enthusiastic publishers of Alcott-published The Louisa Alcott Reader: A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School and The Louisa Alcott Story Book ("edited for schools").38 Or that the first Alcott scholarship to appear in an academic journal-with the exception of a journalistic piece in Sewanee Review in 1928-appeared in a 1932 issue of the Elementary English Review, a journal published by the National Council of Teachers of English for educators in elementary schools. 39 And although, as we shall see, the professoriate would have very little to do with Alcott, librarians and grade school teachers played an important role in keeping her reputation alive. As a representative of Little, Brown noted in a response to a statement about the relative invisibility of Alcott's centenary in 1932, compared to Carroll's that same year, there were dozens of schools and libraries mounting exhibits and parties. 40 But it wasn't just adult, institutional efforts that enabled Alcott to live on. It may have been from an adult perspective that she had earned her nineteenth-century sobriquet, "the children's friend. "41 Nevertheless the word

love emerges again and again in discussions of Alcott: children, especially girls, have simply loved her work. In 1888 Harriet Prescott Spofford could XXI

refer to Alcott as "the writer better loved by the children of America than Shakespere himself. "42 By the 1930s the adjective most commonly paired with Alcott, by Alcott enthusiasts, would seem to be beloved: Katharine Anthony'S biography appeared serially in the Woman's Home Companion, for instance, under the title The Most Beloved American Writer (with illustrations by Norman Rockwell).43 Yet love wasn't a popular concept with the literary establishment or with what had by then become the critical establishment. It was rechristened "sentimentality" and condemned, and Little Women was consigned, usually unread, to sweet inanity. Madelon Bedell points to the way Little Women provided a kind of counter to the modern girl of the 1920s in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, where the March girls are considered "inane females. "44 Lavinia Russ writes of being told by Ernest Hemingway, "'You're so full of young sweetness and light you ought to be carrying Little Women.' (He had never read it.) "45 But despite highbrow indifference, Alcott lived on, famously. Madeleine B. Stern refers to a 1940s list in which Little Women was named one of the ten books written in English most likely to last for five hundred years. 46 Or when in a 1958 TV musical version of Little Women Beth failed to die, the producer and sponsor received a deluge of letters-and the sponsor's advertising agency produced a survey that showed that 98 percent of the American public remembered that in the novel Beth died. 47 The frequency with which Little Women has been filmed or dramatized is itself testimony to the book's popularity. There have been three notable film versions, as Anne Hollander points out in an essay reprinted in this volume. 48 And there have been at least a dozen dramatizations of Little Women and innumerable stagings. 49 Yet another sign of Alcott's cultural stature-and also the stature of Little Women-is the proliferation of biographies of Alcott. As Sicherman documents, Little Women was marketed in the nineteenth century in ways that encouraged readers to identify the author with the heroine.50 The popularity of the person continues to be intimately bound up with the popularity of the book. The numerous full-length biographies of Alcott start with Ednah Cheney's 1889 hagiography and include volumes by Belle Moses, Katharine Anthony, Madeleine Stern, Marjorie Worthington, Martha Saxton, Madelon Bedell, and William Anderson (most have gone through more than one edition)-not to mention various compilations of Alcott's journals and letters. 51 And those are just the major volumes for adults. Juvenile biographies are even more numerous-and even more suggestive of Alcott's stature within the popular imagination. They start with Ednah Cheney'S Louisa xxii

INTRODUCTION

May Alcott, The Children's Friend, published in 1888, and continue with Cornelia Meigs's Newbery Medal-winning Invincible Louisa, first published in 1933, which was followed by another biography in the 1940s, three in the 1950s, four in the 1960s, four in the 1980s (five if you count a compilation of extracts from Alcott's diary), plus biographies in 1991 and 1995, a 1993 edition of Alcott's juvenile diary, a 1995 collection of diary excerpts, and a 1995 Little Women Keepsake Book that comes with a cameolike necklace. 52 Little Women itself, continuously in print since its first publication, was listed, in the mid-twentieth century, as one of the twenty-one best sellers in U.S. history. 53 Currently, thirty-five works by Alcott are in print in the United States, in more than a hundred editions-including more than thirty editions of Little Women. They range from the inexpensive Puffin to the pricey Gordon, from the Scholastic thirty-two-page abridgment to a reprinting of the original edition, and include all the usual paperback suspects, not to mention the Longman ESL edition, the Reader's Digest edition, and Schoenhof's Quatre filles du Docteur March. And not to mention such phenomena as The Little Women Keepsake Diary, The Little Women Journal, and The Louisa May Alcott Cookbook-this last including not Jo March's recipes for too-young lobsters and too-old asparagus but the molasses candy that she knew how to make but didn't. 54 In short, Alcott has long loomed large in the popular imagination. THE CRITICAL IMAGINATION

Her place in the critical imagination, however, has been less assured. As Nina Baym notes, by the end of the nineteenth century Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe were the only women who had survived a canonical winnowing process; by the early twentieth century, they too had dropped out of the canon. 55 One of the reasons why Alcott had some critical stature in the nineteenth century is that literature for children and for adults was less segregated than it is now. The editors of Godey's Lady's Book could note in 1870, "Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are friends in every nursery and schoolroom; and even in the parlor and office they are not unknown .... "56 Children in that decade were likely to dip into the pages of "the best American magazines for adults, the Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, the Century," when the family gathered in the evening around its kerosene lamp57-and the most prestigious magazines did not bar children. As late as the 1890s the editor of Harper's claimed to print nothing "that could not be read aloud in the family circle. "58 Both Harper's and the Atlantic reviewed not only literature for adults but also children's literature throughout the nineteenth century. XXlll

Now it's true that the most prestigious of the nineteenth-century magazines, the ones with the greatest claims to high culture, often revealed some uneasiness when reviewing children's literature. Their reviewers were less likely to celebrate the fact that Alcott's work "interests alike children and those of older growth," as a reviewer for Godey's Lady's Book commented in 1874. 59 Nor were they likely to make the easy assumption that works we might now consider literature for adults, such as the stories in Hospital Sketches, would "afford much additional pleasure to the numerous readers of Little Women, into whose hands the book will be sure to go," as an 1869 reviewer in the National Anti-Slavery Standard did. 60 Instead reviewers for Harper's and especially the Atlantic tended to chafe at the overlapping audience, often attempting to enforce a demarcation between literature for children and that for adults. The most frequently invoked boundary marker was the absence or presence of romance. An 1881 reviewer in the Atlantic, for instance, admits to not "altogether find[ing] satisfaction in the suppressed love-making of these young people" in Jack and Jill. 61 Even Lyman Abbott, who in an 1871 review for Harper's happily suggested that children would read Little Men with interest while their parents would read it with profit, could note the marriages in Book II of Little Women and demur that it "is a rather mature book for the little women, but a capital one for their elders. "62 Or the discomfort felt by a reviewer for the Atlantic might engender a Jamesian circumlocution, a backhanded disavowal of the absence of "adventure and sensation": "If we said that Miss Alcott, as a writer for young people just getting to be young ladies and gentlemen, deserved the great good luck that has attended her books, we should be using an unprofessional frankness and putting in print something we might be sorry for after the story of the 'Old-fashioned Girl' had grown colder in our minds. "63 With less circumlocution, James himself, hoping to put children in their place-the better to create a fictional niche for adults only-castigated Alcott for being "vastly popular with infant readers," for catering to their views "at the expense of their pastors and masters"-for not writing the charming kind of tale that Lyman Abbott's father had written for a previous generation, with the aunts "all wise and wonderful," the nephews and nieces never "under the necessity of teaching them their place. "64 Even one of the librarians emerging professionally at the time could politely sneer that "immature minds and uncultured persons" might find Alcott's work attractive yet "many of the most careful mothers prefer, in the case of several of her writings, that their children should not read them when young" 65-concurring, in effect, that the mature wouldn't want to read her, and the immature shouldn't. XXIV

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So it's not surprising that a writer for the Atlantic could conclude a review of Ednah Cheney's posthumous collation of Alcott's "life, letters, and journals" by lamenting that "great possibilities were lost in Miss Alcott's career. "66 Clearly, for this writer, these possibilities were not activated by writing for children. Such a conclusion is echoed in the Critic, a leading New York literary journal founded in 1881 and specializing in reviews-but this journal also gives ample evidence of the esteem in which Alcott was held. Alcott's name appears frequently in its pages in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, at least twenty-three times, in notes and reviews and even signed letters to the editor. The reviews of her books for children are almost uniformly brief but positive: "Good wine needs no bush, and Miss Alcott needs no reviewer," notes a reviewer of two volumes of stories in 1882; and in 1888 we are told, "We are sure we need only mention Miss Alcott's 'Garland for Girls' (Roberts Bros.) to have it clearly understood that we think every girl ought to have it.... "67 The reviewer of Anna Alcott Pratt's 1893 edition of Comic Tragedies, Louisa's adolescent dramas, begins by acknowledging that the volume "touches a chord of memory and affection that will never cease to vibrate. "68 Even the death of Anna Pratt that year (she was Alcott's older sister, the original of Meg) is an occasion for waxing nostalgic over the loss of the last little woman. 69 Yet when it comes to making summary literary assessments, the Critic is less charitable. The writer of the 1888 obituary concludes that "Miss Alcott's claims to popularity as a writer do not rest upon the literary merit of her books. "70 And the reviewer of Ednah Cheney's collation-in accord with the Atlantic reviewer, and also with Henry james's sentiments regarding the art of the novel-states, "Miss Alcott wrote no book equal to her powers, no book of enduring literary worth; and this was because she wrote for bread, and with a rapidity too great for the best work."71 Still, in these decades when colleges were only beginning to teach American literature and university presses had barely begun churning out scholarly tomes, the most prestigious magazines and the most highbrow reviewers took children's literature-including Alcott's-seriously enough to review it. In the nineteenth century Harper's Monthly reviewed some twelve of Alcott's books; the Critic, whose existence overlapped with Alcott's by only seven years, reviewed at least seven; the Nation, at least nine; Literary World, at least nineteen. Even the Atlantic, generally more comfortable with boys' books than with those for girls, reviewed three. The attitude of the cultural elite was to change, however, as literary criticism professionalized. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and xxv

the early decades of the twentieth, scholarly work was increasingly separating itself from popular culture, with the help of new journals-the Modern Language Association, founded in 1883, began publishing PMLA in 1884, for instance. 72 During these transitional decades, as Alma Payne's invaluable 1980 bibliography of Alcott and also the bibliography for the current volume attest, scores of books and articles addressing Alcott were published, yet almost all of these secondary materials appeared in popular venues, sometimes in highbrow ones perhaps, but almost never in what would now be considered scholarly ones,?3 Between 1885 and 1940 more than three dozen reminiscences or sets of letters appeared in books or in journals ranging from the New England Monthly to St. Nicholas to the Independent to the Ladies'

Home Journal. A like number of appraisals-what we might call appreciations-appeared in journals ranging from the Book Buyer to Photo-Era to

Publishers' Weekly; several appeared in such highbrow periodicals as the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times Book Review. 74 No piece appeared in a scholarly journal of literary criticism,?5 Chapters or entries addressing Alcott also appeared in more than three dozen volumes with titles like Eminent Women, Daughters of the Puritans, Notable Women in History, and When They Were Girls; most of these were published by publishers whose names are no longer familiar. 76 Alcott figured prominently in popular culture, both highbrow and middlebrow, but not in increasingly professionalizing academia. Her work may, for instance, be represented in editor-novelist-critic Charles Dudley Warner's thirty-volume Library of the World's Best Literature, published in 1896, and in a 1901 imitation, Harry Thurston Peck's International Library of Masterpieces. 77 She is just as fully represented in the 1917 edition of Warner's work-then labeled the "University edition. "78 But her work is excluded from the nineteen-volume Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction published in the same year; likewise from the fifty-volume Harvard Classics published in 1910-"the five-foot shelf of books"--even though the editor of the latter acknowledges the needs of young people by appending "Selections from the Five-Foot Shelf of Books for Boys and Girls from Twelve to Eighteen Years of Age. "79 And by midcentury she certainly wouldn't appear in Robert Maynard Hutchins's fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World (nor is she mentioned in the preface when Hutchins makes excuses for omissions of some American writers).8o Another way of gauging Alcott's relative stature is to chart the prevalence of references to her work in standard bibliographical indexes, compared to those to her father Bronson, a minor Transcendentalist to whom followers of Emerson have devoted some attention. 81 The best gauge of pure xxvi

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scholarly attention is probably the number of Ph.D. dissertations addressing each figure. Before 1982, according to indexes of Dissertation Abstracts International, dissertations addressing Bronson outnumber those addressing Louisa by more than 2 to 1. Between 1982 and 1987 the valence shifted, with dissertations attending to Louisa outnumbering those attending to Bronson by about 3 to 1. Since then, Louisa has outstripped Bronson by more than 20 to 1. 82 Also suggestive is the annual bibliography published by the scholarly Modern Language Association, beginning in 1921. Through 1941 the bibliography lists eight items under Bronson's name-and none under Louisa's; between 1942 and 1979, there is a rough parity in citations of the two; between 1980 and 1993, Louisa outstrips Bronson by more than 3 to 1. 83 Other reference tools provide more mixed coverage of both popular and scholarly venues. In such reference tools, citations of Louisa tend to outnumber those of Bronson in the early decades of the twentieth century; he tends to dominate in the middle decades; and she dominates again most recently. In Lewis Leary's Articles on American Literature, which lists essays in both popular and scholarly journals, references to Louisa outnumber those to Bronson almost 2 to 1 until 1950; in the 1950s and 1960s the valence reverses, with references to him outnumbering those to her by about 3 to 1; in the early 1970s, by about 2 to 1. 84 Or in the summary compilations of the Essay and General Literature Index, which indexes chapters in both scholarly and popular books, between 1900 and 1933 references to Louisa oumumbered those to Bronson by a ratio of almost 3 to 1. Then, until 1964, Bronson dominated, achieving a summary ratio of about 3.5 to 1. More recently, and especially since 1980, the majority of chapters documented have addressed Louisa, who has outpaced Bronson by about 9 to 1. In other words, while Louisa may have continued to be popular in the early twentieth century, by midcentury the popular media response paralleled the earlier academic disinterest; only recently has the academic response shifted. Certainly academics in the early twentieth century were not particularly receptive to Alcott's work. In 1900 Harvard professor Barrett Wendell could compare Little Women to Jacob Abbott's earlier Rollo books and dismissively state that its "personages display that rude self-assertion which has generally tainted the lower middle class of English-speaking countries. "85 But at least he still mentioned her and other authors of children's literature. By the 1950s one would not find references to Alcott in major works of criticismwhat would soon be considered classic works-such as R. W. B. Lewis's American Adam or Richard Chase's American Novel and Its Tradition, nor in histories such as Robert E. Spiller's Cycle of American Literature (none xxvii

to Jacob Abbott either).86 Her one indexed appearance in Spiller's more compendious 1948 Literary History of the United States-other than in the volume devoted to bibliographical materials-is in a discussion of American books that an index lists as translated into Swedish: "a curious selection from new and half-forgotten authors, with Louisa May Alcott rubbing elbows with Dashiell Hammett" ;87 this one reference contrasts with twelve index entries for Bronson. A more curious omission, also noted by Payne, is that in the third and posthumous volume of Vernon Louis Parrington's classic Main Currents in American Thought, "Alcott, Louisa M." does indeed appear in the index-but the reference in the text, to "the vagaries of Thoreau and the grotesque vaporings of Alcott," is to her father. 88 As Edward Wagenknecht ingenuously noted in 1952, after suggesting that Little Women might, after Tom Sawyer, be "the most beloved American book": "It needsand is susceptible of-little analysis; critics have, therefore, generally neglected it. "89 Most often the status of Alcott with the cultural elite, throughout most of the twentieth century, can be gauged by such neglect; only rarely is it conveyed more directly. When it is, Alcott is sometimes dismissed because of her associations with children. Such an attitude appears with particular clarity in Odell Shepard's 1938 review of an Alcott biography; Shepard was, not coincidentally, Bronson's biographer. Shepard claims that Louisa "never emerged from adolescence"-"she never grew Up."90 In fact, "[l]iving almost always among intellectuals, she preserved to the age of fifty-six that contempt for ideas which is normal among boys and girls of fifteen ... She seems to have felt, moreover, that love, marriage, and child-bearing were interruptions of serious business-although she never quite made out what the serious business of life really is, unless it be earning a livelihood" (393). Which of course it couldn't be, for a woman. Certainly it wasn't for her improvident father Bronson. And what is the serious business of life? If it's not love and marriage, perhaps it's war, for Shepard goes on to indict Alcott for referring to the war between France and Prussia as a "silly little war"-"these words show the bounce and swagger of a mind that has never really faced life's darker mysteries" (393). One reason for her popularity, Shepard concludes, is "that the American public is itself immature in thought and mood" (393). More often Alcott is dismissed because she is associated with sentimentality-a dismissal that positive appraisals often contest in their opening sentences. A positive review of the 1933 film of Little Women begins, "It has ... long been the custom to refer to Louisa M. Alcott's masterpiece as the classic expression of a certain kind of American sentimentalism.... "91 xxviii

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A feminist reassessment in 1974 begins, "Among the earliest of American novelists to champion the ideal of the New Woman was Louisa May Alcott, who is more apt to be identified with sentimentality and domestic virtues than with a crusading feminist spirit. "92 Perhaps the fullest expression of midcentury critical dismay with Alcott-though at times hedged and oblique-appears in a review in the Times Literary Supplement in 1957. 93 The reviewer, only minimally concerned with the edition of Little Men that is his or her pretext, is someone who can describe Mrs. Jo and Professor Bhaer as "conducting a rare collection of little horrors up the steep paths of virtue"-"How can she go on reporting the conversations and plays of these egregious infants, as if they were so important?" And the reviewer is someone who laments the emasculation of children's novels in the previous forty years. Having therewith vented some spleen, he or she goes on to say that Little Women, "it is fair to say, is beyond the reach of criticism. When a book like this is so loved and cherishedand not merely by the unintelligent-any critic who feels he should discuss Miss Alcott's sentimentality and priggishness will be shown the door." The reviewer nonetheless devotes considerable attention to the failings of Alcott's books about the March family-and with, I hate to admit, some insight. Finally, though, the reviewer makes a summary judgment, seemingly more even-handed than the opening sentences, with the help of catchwords of midcentury criticism-sentimental, classic, universal-and claims that the March family books "are not sentimental rubbish, but they are not classics either, in the sense that they have a relevance outside their time and place, a universal message to communicate." By the standards of midcentury criticism, Alcott's continuing popularity doesn't count for anything, not even as an indication of something that could be considered universality. Despite these dismissals, and despite the even more common critical silence, critical activity with respect to Alcott surged in the 1940s. Nineteen forty-three was a banner year: Leona Rostenberg published her discovery of Alcott thrillers written under the name A. M. Barnard.94 And her colleague Madeleine Stern published essays in journals ranging from American Notes and Queries to More Books to the New England Quarterly.95 Seven years later Stern published what has become the standard biography. In 1954 she published work on Alcott in American Literature, the flagship journal of the American Literature group of the Modern Language Association. 96 Stern's efforts had some impact. So too did Brigid Brophy's 1965 essay in the New York Times Book Review, quoted in an epigraph to this introduction. Brophy undertakes a striking endorsement of craftsmanship in sentimentality, addressing the charge of sentimentality head on {"the dreadful XXIX

books are masterpieces").97 The directness with which she addresses sentimentality is part of the reason why she had some impact. Another is where she published it. Situated between high academic culture and popular culture (it prints the New York Times bestseller lists), the Book Review has periodically printed essays that address Alcott, in whole or in part-one in 1932, marking the centennial of Alcott's birth, and several in recent decades, beginning with Brophy's in 1965 98-not to mention reviews of various Alcott publications and republications and biographical materials, including the Stephen King review of A Long Fatal Love Chase. This attention is significant, for the Book Review functions as both a bellwether of intellectual opinion and a shaper of it: researchers suggest that leading intellectual journals play a significant role as cultural gatekeepers in America, comparable to Oxford and Cambridge in England-and some 75 percent of our intellectual elite reads the New York Times Book Review. 99 So Brophy's essay was well placed to have an impact. The emerging feminist movement had an impact as well. Although the early published response to Alcott by late-twentieth-century feminists was mixed, some of the first academic journals to publish work on Alcott were feminist journals. Karen Lindsay published "Louisa May Alcott: The Author of 'Little Women' as Feminist" in Women: A Journal of Liberation in 1970. 100 In 1974 Carolyn Forrey's essay on the New Woman addressed Alcott along with other authors. lol If nothing else, the women's movement provided an environment hospitable to reevaluating Alcott. Just as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow-Wallpaper" has served as a touchstone for feminist criticism of American literature for adults (from its rediscovery in the 1970s, then its canonization, to recent work questioning its racial subtext),102 the touchstone for feminist interest in-and ambivalence about-children's literature is Little Women. If Signs and New Literary History have started publishing essays on children's literatureand American Literature has again done so-you can almost be certain that the essays address Alcott. l03 In the first (and only) essay on Alcott in Signs, arguably the leading journal of feminist scholarship, Ann B. Murphy contrasts Little Women with Huckleberry Finn and draws on the work of feminist psychologists and educators, ranging from Carol Gilligan to Jessica Benjamin, to illuminate Alcott's mapping of women's desire. l04 In New Literary History, a case study of response to Little Women fleshes out Catharine R. Stimpson's theoretical discussion of canons, one that makes room for affective response-a reply, if you will, to the mid century debate over Alcott as "beloved" or, more negatively, "sentimental";105 this essay xxx

INTRODUCTION

is reprinted in the current volume. And in the leading journal for American literature, Frances Armstrong ranges widely through the Alcott canon, including the journals and letters as well as the fiction for children and the fiction for adults, to address the slippery meanings, not all negative, of the concept of littleness. 106 Yet, as I've noted, the early response of feminists was mixed. In 1972 Patricia Meyer Spacks was simply dismissive of Alcott's little women: "The book is not one an adult is likely to reread with pleasure .... "107 In 1978 Nina Baym viewed the publication of Little Women and the Elsie Dinsmore books as a watershed marking "the decline of woman's fiction ... , because they represent the transformation of woman's fiction into girl's fiction."108 In 1979 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar lament "Louisa May Alcott's Jo March learning to write moral homilies for children instead of ambitious gothic thrillers"-which latter would have been "assuredly major," they declare, unlike literature for children. 109 When scholars in the seventies were more appreciative, their discussions appeared in more marginal contexts. Their essays might appear not in volumes published by Ivy League presses but in collections of conference papers published by a small college library.1l0 Even as late as 1982 an appreciation by noted scholar Carolyn Heilbrun strains to accommodate itself to a collection on the 1920s.1I1 But dismissiveness, condescension, and marginalization have now become less common. The roster of mainstream feminist critics who have accorded Little Women serious attention-not just dismissing the children's books in order to discuss what's really important, literature for adultsinclude not only Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson but the likes of Nina Auerbach, Ann Douglas, Judith Fetterley, and Elaine Showalter. 1l2 Nina Auerbach's 1976 article, subsequently a chapter and now reprinted in this volume, marks the first serious engagement of a leading feminist critic with Little Women; Auerbach's emphasis on "communities of women" makes her approach congruent with those of cultural feminists. 1\3 Judith Fetterley's influential 1979 essay, also reprinted in this volume, was the first to sketch Alcott's ambivalence in Little Women, the differing overt and covert messages, the latter subversive; Fetterley's work thus parallels the palimpsestic readings that Gilbert and Gubar were simultaneously undertaking in The Madwoman in the Attic-while remedying their condescension toward Alcott's work.1l4 Many subsequent essays on Alcott have covered similar ground, sometimes placing greater emphasis on submission, sometimes on subversion, but rarely arguing as cogently as Fetterley does. Another impetus for this renewed attention to Little Women, as Fetterley and such critics as Elizabeth Lennox Keyser have noted, has been XXXI

the reprinting of forgotten works, especially Alcott's pseudonymous thrillers. lIS The appearance of these thrillers, beginning in 1975 with Behind a Mask and followed a year later by Plots and Counterplots, has encouraged critics to read Little Women differently, to find the raging sensations beneath the surface of this book that Alcott herself was tempted to dismiss as "moral pap" for the young.ll6 Some of the most important Alcott scholarship has, in fact, appeared in conjunction with issuing editions of Alcott's work. For one thing, there's the scholarly work of excavating the works themselves, making them available to a modern audience. Then there are often crucial editorial decisions, such as determining the sequencing of chapters in the manuscript of Diana and Persis or whether to resuscitate the original 1868 edition of the text of Little Women, instead of the more commonly reprinted edition, the expur-

gated 1880 one. And the accompanying introductions or afterwords are often significant contributions to scholarship-more so for Little Women than for other novels. Many scholars-including Nina Auerbach, Madelon Bedell, Elaine Showalter, and Valerie Alderson-have written introductions or afterwords that go well beyond the standard brief appreciation plus salient biographical facts.117 One of the most important is by Ann Douglas, an essay reprinted in this volume: this wide-ranging contextual reading by a scholar of American studies places Little Women in the context of Alcott's family biography, her father Bronson's Transcendentalist thinking, genre history (Alcott wrote in the tradition of the family journal rather than the courtship tale), and even national history (Alcott effectively reifies Lincoln's image of a house divided then reunited).u s Another suturing of the academic and the popular is the frequency with which scholars and others writing on nonliterary topics invoke Little Women and other Alcott works. An architect designing an Ohio country house, for clients with four children, describes himself as starting by envisioning "Louisa May Alcott time."119 A UPI story on changes in women's hair styles opens with a thoughtful discussion of An Old-Fashioned Girl.120 Historian Linda Kerber introduces a discussion of religiosity and individualism by invoking Alcott's use of Pilgrim's Progress. 121 Jackie DeFazio, president of the American Association of University Women, closes her afterword to a study of girls in school with a statement that disparages the way girls are still encouraged to become little women. 122 Cheri Register reads her own history of illness, and its meanings, against the illness portrayed in Little Women. 123 Texts accompanying a 1996 exhibit of Winslow Homer's paintings contextualize his images of nineteenth-century childhood by referring to Alcott.124

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As for scholarship more focused on Alcott, one sign of increasing critical respect is the appearance of book-length scholarly studies devoted to her, especially since 1980. Two are by scholars of American studies, Charles Strickland and Sarah Elbert. l2S Then there are Alma Payne's Reference Guide, Ruth MacDonald's contribution to the Twayne series, Joy Marsella's study of the short stories, Madeleine Stern's collection of essays, and Gloria Delamar's bio-bibliography.126 An important recent volume of literary criticism is Whispers in the Dark, in which Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, a leading critic of children's literature and editor of the scholarly journal Children's

Literature, finds Alcott critiquing prevailing values throughout her career, not just in the sensation stories and Little Women but in the subsequent fiction for children as well. 127 And that's just the book-length studies. There is likewise an accelerating tendency to address Alcott-often to devote chapters to her-in studies of nineteenth-century women authors, domestic fiction, political fiction, women diarists, the female bildungsroman, patriarchy, maternity, women and war, feminist theology.128 Not to mention articles focusing on Alcott in mainstream academic journals as diverse as New England Quarterly, American Literary History, Christianity and Literature, Legacy, and boundary 2. m One of the most interesting of these essays-and one that actually focuses on Little Women rather than works addressed to adults-is a chapter in Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters. 130 Alcott becomes Brodhead's representative figure of the pivotal 1860s, when high and low culture were in the process of separating. Alcott still had access to all the levels-to the high culture being cultivated by the Atlantic; to the low culture being created by such story-papers as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, whose readership still overlapped with that for domestic fiction; and to an older "domestic-tutelary model of writing." Alcott consciously navigated among these alternatives-and provides a map of this navigation in Little Women. Then of course there's the wealth of Alcott scholarship that has appeared in venues devoted to study of children's literature. Books addressing American children's literature, in whole or in part, usually have something to offer regarding Alcott. A few critics, like Jerry Griswold, are still dismissive of Alcott's "willful perversity" in constantly humbling her characters. 13I Others, like Charles Frey and John Griffith, acknowledge the power of her celebration of sisterhood-and the extent to which her realistic classic has become mythic for many readers.132 Or else, like Margery Fisher, they explore Alcott's technical virtuosity, the deceptive simplicity of her style, perhaps the brilliance of her characterizations-in an entry tucked away, in Fisher's case, in a literary dictionary. III Other studies address such topics as

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playacting and the play of humor, as Lynne Vallone does, or diet and femininity, as Claudia Nelson does.134 Carol Gay traces the place of Alcott in American culture as revealed by dramatic and especially cinematic versions of Little Women, focusing particularly on the sensitivity of Cukor's 1933 version, starring Katharine Hepburn.13S Journals devoted to children's literature have been receptive to Alcott since their early years. The Elementary English Review, begun in 1924, devoted its November 1932 issue to Alcott; The Lion and the Unicorn published an essay on Alcott during its first year of publication, in 1977; Children's Literature in Education, in 1978, in its ninth year (and again two years later); Children's Literature, in 1981, in its ninth year (and frequently thereafter). In the 1981 essay in Children's Literature, for instance, Anne Hollander opens up issues of desire and sexuality and their relationship to art, the impact of money, and both the limitations faced by Alcott and the limitations of her art. 136 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant's 1989 essay in Children's Literature, which sees the language of bodily violation in Little Women as revealing the true horrors of what Alcott was attempting, was named the runner-up for the Children's Literature Association Article Award in 1990.137 Work by Alcott is likewise starting to appear in such important academic anthologies as the Heath Anthology of American Literature and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Yet in these academic contexts she has continued to be represented-as is still usually the case when her work is addressed in mainstream academic books and periodicals-by her "flawed" works for adults rather than her better known (and often better, period) works for children. \38 Mainstream critics of Alcott continue to indulge in a move characteristic of adults when they "rediscover" a work of children's literature, especially if that work is targeted at adolescents: if it speaks to adults, then it can't really be for children. Given, further, the relative lack of critical attention to the more realistic modes of children's literature,139 it may be that much easier for adult-oriented critics to appropriate domestic fiction like hers for themselves, leaving the children with fantasy and fairy tales. Yet even as we write we see a copy of the 1996 edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature for Women: the excerpt from Work has been replaced with chapters from Little Women. The publisher's brochure proclaims that these chapters "introduce a genre new to the anthology: children's writing." At times, in short, reengagement with Alcott has been uneven. At times it has meant seeking out the works she addressed more to adults than to children. At times it has taken the form of attempts to rescue a token work xxxiv

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from the children's ghetto, leaving the ghetto intact. Yet tokenism can beand seems to be now-the first step toward reconstruction and re-vision. The essays in the current volume include key essays from the last two decades, as academia has increasingly embraced Alcott: we have already discussed the significance of this work by Nina Auerbach, Judith Fetterley, Ann Douglas, Catharine R. Stimpson, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, and Anne Hollander. To them we have added a commentary from outside the academy: the first of Victoria Roberts's Little Women cartoons, which appeared in Ms. in 1988. The essays new to this volume are variously scholarly and personal and concerned with the popular as well as with the critical imagination. In addition to a feminist perspective-the valuing of women's experience, imagination, and accomplishments-they share a concern for discourse, situating

Little Women within frameworks of communication ranging from the conventions of pictorial representation to the tropes of lesbian politics, and from the stylistics of domestic architecture to Alcott's "songs to aging children" and to her "transatlantic translations." This attention to discourse mirrors Little Women's own preoccupation with the issue of a young woman's finding her voice. It also reflects the feminist desire of the present volume's editors and essayists to blur the boundaries between academic disciplines and to move freely among many systems of discourse and modes of thought. Accordingly, contributors come from a number of academic fields-literature (including creative writing), history, education, American studies, and library science. While most of the essays situate Little Women in one or more of its American contexts, one of the bibliographers, Aiko Moro-oka, details the depth of interest in Alcott in Japan. What might be most signal in terms of diversity of perspective, however, is the presence of two male contributors. Studies by Charles Strickland, Richard Brodhead, and Jerry Griswold notwithstanding, few contemporary male critics have turned their attention to Little Women,140 a fact which engages Jan Susina in his essay, "Men and Little Women: Notes of a Resisting (Male) Reader." Many of the new essays also testify to a characteristic maneuver of generations of Little Women's readers: the desire to appropriate the text, to make it one's own. Susan R. Gannon's "Getting Cozy With a Classic: Visualizing Little Women" charts the history of visual appropriations (including those based on motion picture versions of Little Women), beginning with Alcott's first illustrator, her sister May, and ending with the American Library Association's 1994 reading poster. The poster features a publicity still from Gillian Armstrong's 1994 film version of Little Women showing Marmee surrounded by her daughters and reading "not a letter from their xxxv

father, but the novel Little Women . .. thus modeling for young readers a return to the authenticating text which has so often been adapted, revised, abridged, dramatized for them." Gannon's discussion of the visual interpretations examines the role of the publishing industry as well as the "crosscurrents of the cultural moment" in transforming Little Women into a text that has become the totality of the various readings it has inspired. Gannon concludes that the popular visual tradition of Little Women is most telling for its omissions of the novel's troubling and least conventional elements. In contrast, our next two critics highlight elements that both the popular visual tradition and the critical tradition have underplayed, if not suppressed. "'Queer Performances': Lesbian Politics in Little Women" by Roberta Seelinger Trites looks directly at what is least conventional in Little Women: what Trites aptly refers to as Jo March's "androgynous nonconformity." Readers and critics of Little Women have a long and sometimes uneasy history of noting Jo's rejection of the role of young lady and her concomitant "disappointment in not being a boy."141 What we might call the standard feminist line on Jo goes beyond seeing her behavior as a tomboy phase she will eventually outgrow; Jo's masculine nickname and desire to be the son of the family instead reflect her frustration with the restrictions imposed on women by the patriarchal social order. Trites takes up the argument at the point where previous critics have bailed out: the intersection of gender and sexual identity. Framing gender as a social, rather than a biological construct, Trites stresses the role-like, "performative" nature of gender to argue that in "Jo's refusal to perform her prescribed gender role lies a critique of heterosexuality that can be read as a strong affirmation of lesbian politics." Little Women's critique of heterosexuality engages the critic Jan Susina as well, but he interprets Alcott's critique not as an affirmation of lesbian politics but as evidence that Little Women is an "anti-male text." In "Men and Little Women: Notes of a Resisting (Male) Reader" Susina considers why so few men read Little Women. He finds an answer in Alcott's positioning the text's male readers as "Laurie, the fortunate outsider, who is simply allowed to observe the actions of women without speaking" and who, despite aging, forever remains a boy, forever remains inferior. Susina sees this situation replicated in the domain of literary criticism: admiring female critics of Little Women form a charmed circle impervious to any male critic who dares to point to flaws in the text. Considering the essays by Trites and Susina in counterpoint, we might wonder if Little Women further destabilizes gender by occasionally-or frequently-positioning female as well as male readers in the role of Laurie, the male outsider seeking access to the sisters and Marmee. xxxvi

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Susina's using a spatial metaphor to dub Laurie a "fortunate outsider" hints at the importance space plays in writers' as well as critics' responses to Little Women. Poet Sue Standing's "In Jo's Garret: Little Women and the Space of Imagination" employs Gaston Bachelard's concept of "felicitous space" to read Little Women as a story "about finding a place for the imagination to flourish." Standing interweaves her recollections of reading Little Women in her childhood with similar recollections from friends and colleagues, most of them fellow writers, all of them women (as if in confirmation of Jan Susina's thesis, none of the men she asked had read the book 142 ). Standing's fascination with Jo's garret, the place in which Jo wrote, is echoed by Standing's colleagues, as is her ability to describe the physical space in which she read the book-for eight-year-old Standing, the basement of her family's home in Bountiful, Utah. Little Women in hand, Standing decided to become a writer, thereby rewriting the future her Mormon girlhood had led her to expect. The felicitous space which Standing and her fellow writers find so alluring is the subject of "'A power in the house': Little Women and the Architecture of Individual Expression," by David Watters. His examination of Little Women's material culture of domesticity explicates Alcott's construction of the March home and suggests a key reason for its allure: "the architecture of Little Women bespeaks the growth of a writer." Moreover, as inspiring as twentieth-century women writers have found Jo's garret, Alcott's nineteenth-century readers would have found the March girls' home expressive--and inspiring-wherever they looked. Watters argues that the style of the Marches' home was as "expressive" to Alcott's contemporary readers as was her literary style; scrutiny of Little Women's architecture and furnishings "reveals strategic choices by Louisa May Alcott to encourage self-expression, within the bounds of what she called 'domestic eloquence.'" Within this paradigm, the household architecture underscores "Jo's struggle to enter the parlor on her own terms as an author, rather than a daughter or wife. " Becoming an author means, however, that one is read, so Watters then turns to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Like previous critics, Watters sees Pilgrim's Progress serving as both a moral and literary guide to Little Women's plot and character development, but he extends the argument to show how the domestic architecture of Pilgrim's Progress, particularly the rooms of the

House of Interpreter, "encodes the growth of right reading." Although circumscribed by patriarchy, this reading is nevertheless empowering for both Jo and readers of Little Women who find a home within the text. Anne K. Phillips offers her own right reading of the importance of Pilgrim's Progress to Little Women in "The Prophets and the Martyrs: Pilgrims xxxvii

and Missionaries in Little Women and Jack and Jill." In contrast to those critics who view Pilgrim's Progress as running counter to the novel's liberating implications, Phillips argues that Little Women's "Bunyanesque vision of the world is the model" for adult men and women as well as for children and "it actually offers the pilgrims freedom from the limitations of nineteenth-century social mores." While many critics assume that the pilgrim metaphor ceases to be important after the first half of Little Women, Phillips details its importance throughout the novel, with particular attention to the relevance of two episodes in Pilgrim's Progress to Little Women's second half. Alcott's much later Jack and Jill offers another example of Alcott's comprehensive use of a metaphor, this time that of missions and missionaries. Yet here the metaphor works to opposite effect: "Studied together, Little Women and Jack and Jill provide, respectively, self-actualizing and self-negating rites of passage from childhood into adolescence." The tension between self-actualization and patriarchal self-negation is at the heart of Kathryn Manson Tomasek's "A Greater Happiness: Searching for Feminist Utopia in Little Women." Tomasek's project is to read Little Women as a "site of feminist utopian thought" while keeping in mind two variant meanings of utopia's Greek roots: "eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place)." Tomasek notes that both meanings of utopia -it is an ideal or an impossibility (and sometimes both)-were at work in the nineteenth century's domestic ideal of the home, the good place some women found so confining as to be a no place. Tomasek identifies two such good places in Little Women, Jo's independence and her family's community of women, both of which are marked by an absence of men and both of which become a no place upon the "return of the father [and] the reinscription of nineteenth-century gender norms which require the self-effacement and marriage of little women." Although Alcott continued her search for a good place throughout the March family trilogy, inventing new options for Jo in Little Men and Jo's Boys, her options eventually succumbed to the domestic ideology they sought to challenge. Tomasek nevertheless concludes on an optimistic note for she finds Alcott's "ongoing efforts to negotiate the complex and shifting terrain of gender" more important than her "inability to find a good place that was not also a no place." The emphasis shifts firmly to Alcott's success in creating a good place in "Transatlantic Translations: Communities of Education in Alcott and Bronte." Christine Doyle compares the educational communities in Little Women and Jo's Boys with those Charlotte Bronte depicts in Jane Eyre and Villette. While Doyle notes that "Alcott's utopian vision has its flaws," Alcott was far more able than her transatlantic mentor to imagine a scenario in xxxviii

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which the heroine finds both financial security and personal happiness within an educational setting. Or as Doyle writes, "In the children's novels which most strongly allude to Charlotte Bronte, Alcott directly opposes her British counterpart in insisting that the school-based community can be the seat of fulfillment for hopes both personal and professional." The fulfillment approaches that of a utopia in la's Boys when ideal family joins ideal school to form "one powerful unit, the family-based school." Susan Laird sees Alcott's family-based school just not as powerful but as paradigmatic in "Learning from Marmee's Teaching: Alcott's Response to Girls' Miseducation." A philosopher of education, Laird addresses two areas of neglect within discussions of both mainstream educational theory and feminist pedagogy: philosophical inquiry regarding the teaching of girls in coeducational common schools and the search for historical precedents for such an inquiry. Seeking to remedy this neglect, Laird first examines Alcott's Little Women for its "artfully critical close studies of teachers and teaching." She then examines Little Men and la's Boys for their "serious, albeit seldom acknowledged, feminist thought about the problems and possibilities of coeducation." Both examinations rely upon a framework which presents girls' miseducation as twofold, as negative achievement on the girls' part, and as error on the teacher's. Negative achievement is signaled by low self-esteem and deficiencies in those skills and attitudes that make for healthy adult survival. Error on the teacher's part can take anyone of a number of forms of gender bias. Mrs. March educates, rather than miseducates, her daughters by fostering their "growing capacities and responsibility for learning to love and survive despite their troubles, especially her own absence," but she is not a perfect teacher-witness Beth's miseducation as negative achievement (her low self-esteem and unwitting exposure to the scarlet fever that leads to her premature death). Even if she were, influences outside the home have their own negative pedagogical effect. Accordingly, in Little Men and la's Boys, Jo teaches so as to counteract girls' miseducation as negative achievement and as error, including the effect the miseducation of boys has on girls' educational achievements. But as much as she admires Alcott's feminist pedagogy, Laird notes that it too is not perfect, for it fails to imagine a "racially desegregated, mutual pedagogical partnership" and it can appear unrealistic in its presumption of "a coherent, unproblematic configuration of coeducation" in which neither parents nor society at large threatens Plumfield and Laurence College's philosophy, practices, or continued existence. Our last two essays continue the discussion of girls' growth and development by returning to the autobiographical impulse that informs so many critiques of Little Women. Janice M. Alberghene's "Little Women and xxxix

The Living Is Easy: Rereading and Rewriting Alcott" begins by tracing Alberghene's coming of age with Little Women and her subsequent "falling out" with Alcott over Little Women's erasures of race. The second half of the essay addresses those erasures of race through an intertextual reading of Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy with Alcott's Little Women. Acknowledging that "West's novel is first and foremost a complex, autobiographical exploration of racial politics, female ambition, and the Black Bourgeoisie," Alberghene notes that The Living Is Easy can also be read as a critique of Little Women, chiefly through the experiences of its heroine, Cleo Jericho, the most high-spirited of four young African American sisters. Early in the novel Cleo is pictured reading Little Women in the Boston parlor of the spinster who employs her as a companion, a clear signal that The Living Is Easy will interrogate the consequences of little womanhood for a heroine who is black. Alberghene foregrounds these consequences (all negative) to "highlight Little Women's unconscious privileging of whiteness" and to reappraise West's novel. Michelle A. Masse's "Songs to Aging Children: Louisa May Alcott's March Trilogy" explores the reader's (particularly the mature reader-feminist critic's) fascination with Jo's adolescent narcissism. Masse sees a close parallel between her own shifting responses to Little Women over the past three and a half decades and those of other feminist critics, but says, "What I find strange about my own critical history in response to Little Women, however, is the intensity of the search for a kind of 'right answer' that I don't seek in other texts." Masse resolutely avoids looking for a "right answer" in her essay, focusing instead on readerly resistance to "accepting partial solutions, not just in Little Women but in the March trilogy, which closes with Jo in her midforties." Accepting partial solutions means letting go of the narcissist's plot, a hard task because of the narcissist's attractive belief/fantasy of the self as exceptional, free from the constraints that limit ordinary people. Challenging the reluctance to let go, Masse argues that the March trilogy tracks the compromises which constitute "the messy reality of adult identity." Moreover, "[b]y having Jo grow up and old within the constraints of her culture rather than escaping its strictures, Alcott undermines our own adolescent fantasies." Accounting as it does for so many threads of feminist response, Masse's farewell to adolescent fantasies can be read as feminist criticism's coming of age in response to Little Women and its sequels. We conclude with two bibliographies. Aiko Moro-oka's "Alcott in Japan: A Selected Bibliography" marks an important first step toward recognizing Alcott's international significance, a significance that may be especially salient in Japan. Even in the 1930s American commentators were rexl

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marking on the popularity of Little Women in Japan: one noted that the book was required school reading; another related an anecdote in which an American speaking at a Tokyo girls' school found that the girls not only understood all the allusions but one even supplied the name of the school Jo started-Plumfield-when the speaker momentarily fumbled for its name. 143 Also suggestive is that William T. Anderson and David Wade's lavish photobiography of Alcott was translated into Japanese and published in Japan in 1992, three years before it appeared in English in the United States. Morooka's bibliography testifies both to increasing scholarly interest in Alcott and to continuing popular interest, listing not only scholarly pieces but also novellengrh cartoons (manga), similar to graphic novels in the United States, as well as animated cartoons. Finally, the "Selected Bibliography of Alcott Biography and Criticism," by Beverly Lyon Clark and Linnea Hendrickson, documents the changes in reception charted in this introduction. The bibliography includes materials addressed to both popular and academic audiences. It augments previous lists of biographical and critical materials published earlier in the current century, more than doubling the number of nineteenth-century items that have been indexed for Alcott scholars. Last, but not least, the bibliography reveals the wealth of Alcott scholarship produced during the last two decades. NOTES

The sources for the epigraphs are as follows: Jane Addams, quoted in Barbara Sicherman, "Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism," American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 80; Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913),20; Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (1958; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 90; Brigid Brophy, "A Masterpiece, and Dreadful," New York Times Book Review, 17 January 1965, 1; Isabelle Holland, entry in Books I Read When I Was Young: The Favorite Books of Famous People, ed. Bernice Cullinan and M. Jerry Weiss (New York: Avon, 1980),83; Cynthia Ozick, "Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Old School Hurts," New York Times Book Review, 31 January 1982, 24; Juris Jurjevics, quoted in Sarah Crichton, "What We Read as Youngsters: Top Editors Recall Their Favorite Childhood Books," Publishers Weekly, 26 February 1982, 121; Judith Martin [Miss Manners], quoted in "Uncle Wiggily's Karma and Other Childhood Memories," New York Times Book Review, 7 December 1986, 47; Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" (1988), in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove, 1989), 213; Gail Mazur, "Growing Up with Jo," Boston Review, February 1988, 18; Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 85; Camille Paglia, quoted in Tanya Barrientos, "Little Women: Big Influence," Providence Journal-Bulletin, 27 December 1994, E2; Sonia Sanchez, quoted in Barrientos, "Little Women,» E2; Ann Petry, quoted in Barbara Sicherman, "Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text," U.S. History as Women:S History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995),261; Anna

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Quindlen, Introduction to Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), [vi]; Barbara Kingsolver, "In Case You Ever Want to Go Home Again," in High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 44; Rachel, in an episode of Friends, February 1997. We are grateful to Patsy Cumming for alerting us to the statements by Gloria Steinem and Ursula K. Le Guin, and to Andrew Zercie for the quotation from Friends. 1. "The 25 Most Important Women in American History," Ladies' Home Jour-

nal, July 1986, 127. For another list of twenty-five that includes Alcott, see Madeleine B. Stern and Paulette Rose, "25 Landmark Feminist Books of the 19th Century," AB Bookman's Weekly, 26 November 1990, 2097-2109. 2. "American Classics," Ladies' Home Journal, July 1987, 106-9, 136, 138, 141. The Journal has long been partial to Alcottiana, beginning with Alcott's own "Early Marriages" (Ladies' Home Journal, September 1887, 3), then printing a flurry of items around the turn of the century (at a time when the Journal was the largestselling U.S. magazine), followed by a couple of items in the twenties and thirties, and culminating recently in an extract from Alcott's much ballyhooed A Long Fatal Love Chase: "The Obsession," Ladies' Home Journal, October 1995, 120-22, 126, 202. For discussion of the cultural role of the Journal see Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the "Ladies' Home Journal" and the "Saturday Evening Post," 1880-1910 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1994). 3. In 1940 the post office produced a five-cent stamp featuring Louisa May Alcott, one of five authors so honored (see Gloria T. Delamar, Louisa May Alcott and "Little Women": Biography, Critique, Publications, Poems, Songs and Contemporary Relevance Uefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1990], 166). We are grateful to Sue Gannon for alerting us to the perfume. 4. See Marshall Fine, "Little Women Finds a Big Female Following," USA Today, 12 January 1995, Dl; Karen S. Peterson, "Little Women Lost on Teens of the '90s," USA Today, 3 January 1995, D6. In 1913, on the other hand, when Little Women was first dramatized, Alcott's nephew could appreciate the way the play brought "its story into the lives of people who have never read it": "How many men and boys, who scorn to read what they regard as a girl's book, will refuse to escort their wives or sisters or friends or sweethearts to the theater?" (John S. P. Alcott, "The Little Women of Long Ago," Good Housekeeping, February 1913, 184). For other hints that Little Women may be appealing less to girls today than it has in the past see Ruth K. MacDonald, "Louisa May Alcott's Little Women: Who Is Still Reading Miss Alcott and Why," in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, ed. Perry Nodelman (West Lafayette, Ind.: Children's Literature Association, 1985), 1:13-29; Jill P. May, "Feminism and Children's Literature: Fitting Little Women into the American Literary Canon," CEA Critic 56 (Spring/Summer 1994): 19-27; and Mary Gaitskill, "Does Little Women Belittle Women?" Vogue, January 1995, 36, 38, 44. 5. Stephen King, "Blood and Thunder in Concord," New York Times Book Review, 10 September 1995, 17-20. 6. On Authors, see Nina Auerbach, "Feminist Criticism Reviewed," in Gender and Literary Voice, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980),263. We are grateful to Kay Vandergrift for information about card games. 7. See "Little Women," Advertisement for the Ashton-Drake galleries, Advertising Insert, Providence Journal, 12 June 1994. 8. The Madame Alexander 100th Anniversary Collection (New York: Alexander Doll Company, [1995], n. pag.). As Clara Hallard Fawcett has said of Martha Thompson's decision to design Little Women dolls in the fifties, "the youth of Little Women was in a period of quaint charming costume, quite a point to consider in pleasing doll lovers" ("The Creative Artist and the Doll," Hobbies, October 1953, 52).

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9. Little Women (Jo-Beth-Amy-Meg) Paper Dolls from the Madame Alexander Collection (Salt Lake City: Peck Aubry Collection, 1994), n. pag. 10. Rachel Taft Dixon, Little Women (B. Shackman, 1991)-an adaptation of 1934 paper dolls based on the Katharine Hepburn movie; Janet Nason, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women Paper Dolls (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Evergreen, 1981); Helen Page, Little Women Paperdolls (B. Shackman, 1991); Tayva Patch, "Little Women" Coloring Paper Dolls (Concord: Orchard House, 1983); and Tom Tierney, Little Women Paper Dolls (New York: Dover, 1994). There would also seem to be another Madame Alexander set: Peck-Gandre Presents Little Women Paper Dolls from the Madame Alexander Collection (1993). We are grateful to Donna White for supplying information from her collection. Terri Butler reports that in the 1950s Hallmark published stand-up doll cards based on Little Women. 11. "Revered in Film and Feminism," Time, 19 December 1994, 74. We are grateful to Wendy Betts and Linnea Hendricksen for telling us about these items. 12. ALA Graphics, Fall 1994IWinter 1995,21. See also, e.g., Barrientos, "Little Women. " We are grateful to Denise Anton Wright for alerting us to the poster. 13. And sometimes featuring travel tips on visiting Orchard House, the refurbished Alcott home in Concord-see, e.g., "Between the Lines," HERs (Providence Journal-Bulletin), 1 February 1995, 6-10. 14. Only three of which were subsequently printed. See Caryn James, "Amy Had Golden Curls; Jo Had a Rat. Who Would You Rather Be?" New York Times Book Review, 25 December 1994, 3, 17; Virginia Strong, Letter to the Editor, 15 January 1995,31; Christine Montgomery, Letter to the Editor, 15 January 1995, 31; Debbie Interdonato, Letter to the Editor, 5 February 1995, 31. 15. Sicherman, "Reading Little Women," 256-60. 16. Elaine Showalter, "Little Women: The American Female Myth," in Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991),42. 17. Sicherman, "Reading Little Women," 262-64; Jurjevics, in Crichton, "What We Read"; Leo Lerman, "Little Women: Who's in Love with Miss Louisa May Alcott? I Am," Mademoiselle, December 1973, reprinted in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (New York: G. K. Hall, 1984), 113-14. 18. Charles Ives, "The Alcotts,"in Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961),46-47. 19. Books Change Lives: Quotes to Treasure ([Chicago]: Booklist Publications, American Library Assn.), 1994. We are grateful to Millicent Lenz for alerting us to this volume. 20. Crichton, "What We Read," 121; "Uncle Wiggily's Karma," 47; Books I Read When I Was Young, 83. In the second compilation Susan Sontag and Judith Krantz also list Alcott as among their favorite authors; in the third, Holland is joined by Jeannette H. Eyerly, Lee Bennett Hopkins, Linda Kelsey, Elizabeth Levy, Betty Miles, Ann Petry, Isabel Sanford. 21. "When I Was Very Young: Celebrities Tell Us Their Favorite Childhood Books," Ladies' Home Journal, April 1991, 84; "Our Favorite Storybooks," Country Living, November 1990, 72; "Governors Recall Books of Their Youth," New York Times, 16 November 1989, cited in Showalter, Sister's Choice, 42. 22. Edward Salmon, "Should Children Have a Special Literature?" The Parent's Review 5 (1890), reprinted in A Peculiar Gift: Nineteenth Century Writings on Books for Children, ed. Lance Salway (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Kestrel, 1976),332-39; Carolyn Wedin Sylvander,Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (Troy: Whitston, 1981),107; Laura E. Richards, What Shall the Children Read?, illus. C. B. Falls (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939),33; Nancy Larrick, A Parent's Guide to Children's Reading (1958; reprint, New York: Cardinal EditionPocket, 1959),64; Betsy Hearne, "Live Classics More Than Fifty Years Young or on Their Way," in Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide, rev. ed. (New

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York: Delta-Delacorte, 1990). Recent commentators like Larrick and Hearne are starting to put Little Women in a separate category, as an (aging) classic-when indeed they include Alcott at all. The popular books by Jim Trelease, for instance-which in addressing read-aloud books are of course focusing on books for a younger audiencedo not (see The Read-Aloud Handbook [Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1982]). 23. Marion E. Potter, comp.; Bertha Tannehill and Emma L. Teich, assoc. comps., Children's Catalog: A Guide to the Best Reading for Young People Based on Twenty-Four Selected Library Lists (Minneapolis: Wilson, 1909). The space devoted to Alcott may be shrinking in the more recent editions, yet the most recent one still quotes a Toronto Public Library source to the effect that Little Women "is as wellloved today as when it first appeared" (Juliette Yaakov, ed., with the assistance of Anne Price, Children's Catalog, 16th ed. [New York: H. W. Wilson, 1991]). 24. Review of Little Men, New York Times, 17 June 1871, 2. 25. Caroline H. Dall, review of Eight Cousins, Independent, 7 October 1875, 9. 26. H. R. Hudson, "Concord Books," Harper's Monthly, June 1875, 27. 27. Frank Preston Stearns, Sketches from Concord and Appledore (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895), 82. 28. "Miss Louisa M. Alcott," New York Times, 28 April 1880, 2. 29. M. D. Conway, "The Alcotts," Athenaeum, 24 March 1888, 372-73; "Death of Miss Alcott," Ladies' Home Journal, May 1888, 3; Harriet Prescott Spofford, "Louisa May Alcott," Chautauquan, December 1888, 160-62; "The Alcotts," Critic, 10 March 1888, 118-19; Lucie C. Lillie, "Louisa May Alcott," Cosmopolitan, April 1888, 156-64. 30. "Funeral of Miss Alcott," New York Times, 9 March 1888, 1. 31. Walter Lewin, Academy, 25 January 1890, 55-56; Athenaeum, 9 November 1889, 632; "Two New England Women," Atlantic Monthly, March 1890, 41821; Blackwood's, December 1889, 868-71; John Habberton, "Author and Woman," Cosmopolitan, December 1889,254-55; "Louisa May Alcott," Literary World, 26 October 1889,365-66; Nation, 21 November 1889,416; "Miss Alcott's Life and Letters," Spectator, 16 November 1889, 692-93. 32. Mary Tracy Earle, "A New Edition of Little Men," Book Buyer, December 1901, 381. 33. Algernon Tassin, "Books for Children," in Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent, et a1. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1918),2:402. 34. Caroline Maria Hewins, "Reading of the Young," in Papers Prepared for the World's Library Congress Held at the Columbian Exhibition, ed. M. Dewey (1896), reprinted in Library Work with Children: Reports of Papers and Addresses, ed. Alice I. Hazeltine (White Plains: H. W. Wilson, 1917), 43; Dorothea Lawrance Mann, "When the Alcott Books Were New," Publishers' Weekly, 28 September 1929, excerpt reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 85. See also Mildred Adams's reference to a poll by "a modern girls' magazine," whose readers most often named Little Women as their favorite book ("When the Little Angels Revolted," New York Times Magazine, 6 March 1938, 10). For additional accounts of polls and lists that include Little Women and Alcott, see Delamar, 164-70. 35. "Little Women Leads Poll: Novel Rated Ahead of Bible for Influence on High School Pupils," New York Times, 22 March 1927, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 84. 36. William E. Sage, "Suffragettes Rejoice. 'Tis a Fine Week for the 'Weaker Sex' at the Local Playhouses," Cleveland Leader, 12 October 1912 (clipping, in the Louisa May Alcott papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University); "Popularity of Little Women," Albany Daily Press and Knickerbocker, 22 December 1912 (clipping, Houghton Library). 37. The other was The Diary of Anne Frank. See Lavinia Russ, "Not To Be xliv

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Read on Sunday," Hom Book, October 1968, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 99. 38. Louisa M. Alcott, The Louisa Alcott Reader: A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School (Boston: Little, Brown, 1908); The Louisa Alcott Story Book, ed. for schools by Fanny E. Coe, with a biographical sketch of Miss Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910). Alcott is still appearing in institutional readers, whether compilers reprint a chapter of Little Women, as in the Jamestown Heritage Readers, Book E, ed. Lee Mountain, Sharon Crawley, and Edward Fry (Providence: Jamestown, 1991), 18-24; or provide an account of Alcott's life, as in Arlene J. Morris-Lipsman's Notable Women, illus. Mary Crisanti (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1990),78-81. 39. See Bert Roller, "When Jo Died," Sewanee Review 36 (April 1928): 16470. An entire issue of the Elementary English Review-9 (November 1932)-was devoted to Alcott. 40. F. M. Clouter, "An Alcott Bibliography," Letter to the Editor, Saturday Review of Literature, 19 November 1932, 260. 41. See, e.g., Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott, The Children's Friend (Boston: L. Prang, 1888). A reviewer noted as early as 1875 that "Miss Alcott has fairly won the title of 'The Children's Friend' .... " (Review of Eight Cousins, Overland Monthly, November 1875, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 168-69). 42. Harriet Prescott Spofford, "Louisa May Alcott," Chautauquan, December 1988, 161, Spofford's spelling. Or again-just to take two examples-in 1932 the editor of the Elementary English Review could refer to the Alcotts as "the best loved family in American literature" ("Editorial: Louisa Alcott's Father," Elementary English Review 9 [November 1932]: 245); in 1953 Henry Steele Commager wrote that Alcott was a "spinster who never really understood children, and who wrote perhaps the greatest child's book to come out of the New World. The children loved Little Women from the beginning, and have never ceased to love it" (Introduction, A Critical History of Children's Literature: A Survey of Children's Books in English from Earliest Times to the Present, ed. Cornelia Meigs, Anne Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbitt, and Ruth Hill Viguers [New York: Macmillan, 1953], xi). 43. The first installment appeared in the Woman's Home Companion, December 1937, 9-10, 96-97, 101-02, 107, 111-12. See also Odell Shepard's comment that Alcott was "one of the most widely beloved of American writers" ("Mother of Little Women,» North American Review, June 1938,392); and, e.g., Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the American Novel From the Birth of the Nation to the Middle of the Twentieth Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), excerpt reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 88; and Laura Benet, "Louisa May Alcott," Famous New England Authors (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), 84. 44. Madelon Bedell, Introduction to Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott (New York: Modern Library, 1983), ix. 45. Russ, "Never on Sunday," 100. Such an attitude continues to echo even now: in a cartoon-and-verse satire on "A Gallery of Unlikely Golfers,» the ditty accompanying the cartoon of Alcott, the only woman of the eleven figures included (who range from Pinocchio to Thomas Edison to Confucius), concludes, "Her record, though, is marred since she I Played only little women" (Dick Emmons, ilIus. Everett Davidson, Golf Digest, March 1992, 104). 46. Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa May Alcott: An Appraisal," New England Quarterly 22 (1949): 475-98. 47. Milton Esterow, "TV Put in a Dither by Little Women," New York Times, 31 August 1958,44. 48. Anne Hollander, "Portraying Little Women Through the Ages," New York Times, 15 January 1995, sec. 2,11,21, reprinted in this volume. 49. See Judith C. Ullom, comp., Louisa May Alcott: A Centennial for "Little Women,» An Annotated, Selected Bibliography (Washington: Library of Congress, 1969),26; see also Vivian M. Patraka, "Split Britches in LITTLE WOMEN, The Trag-

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edy: Staging Censorship, Nostalgia, and Desire," Kenyon Review n.S. 15 (Spring 1993): 6-26. 50. Sicherman, "Reading Little Women," 252-53. 51. See Ednah D. Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889); Belle Moses, Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker: A Story of Achievement (New York: D. Appleton, 1909); Katharine Anthony, Louisa May Alcott (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938); Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950); Marjorie Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1958); Martha Saxton, Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Madelon Bedell, The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1980); William T. Anderson, The World of Louisa May Alcott: Little Women, trans. by Yumiko Taniguchi, photographs by David Wade (Tokyo: Hyuryudo Art Publishing Company, 1992), reprinted in English as The World of Louisa May Alcott: A First-Time Glimpse into the Life and Times of Louisa May Alcott, Author of "Little Women» (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995); Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott, ed. Jessie Bonstelle and Marion deForest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914); The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy; assoc. editor, Madeleine B. Stern (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Daniel Shealy and Joel Myerson; assoc. editor, Madeleine B. Stern (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). 52. See Cheney, Louisa May Alcott, The Children's Friend; Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of "Little Women» (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933). The following juvenile biographies and related works appear in the bibliography for the current volume: the 1943 volume by Jean Brown Wagoner; the 1954 volume by Catherine Owens Peare; the 1955 volumes by Pamela Brown and Joan Howard; the 1963 volume by Martha Robinson; the 1965 volume by Helen Waite Papashvily; the 1968 volume by Aileen Fisher and Olive Rabe; the 1969 volume by Anne Colver; the 1984 volume by Carol Greene; the 1986 volume by Laurence Santtey; the 1988 volumes by Kathleen Burke, Marci Ridlon McGill, and Suzanne Weyn; the 1991 volume by Norma Johnston; the 1993 volume by Cary Ryan; the 1995 volumes by M. J. Carr, Mary E. Lyons, and Jill C. Wheeler. 53. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 8. 54. Suzanne Weyn, The Little Women Keepsake Diary: Based on the Beloved Book by Louisa May Alcott (New York: Scholastic, 1988); The Little Women Journal (New York: Gramercy Books, n.d.); The Louisa May Alcott Cookbook, compo Gretchen Anderson, illus. Karen Milone (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). 55. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 23. 56. Editorial, Godey's Lady's Book, November 1870,472. 57. Alice M. Jordan, From Rollo to Tom Sawyer and Other Papers (Boston: Horn Book, 1958), 39. Another sign of the permeability of the boundaries between literature for children and that for adults is that in 1885 the Indianapolis Public Library classified all of Alcott's books as adult fiction (John Tebbel, The Expansion of an Industry, 1865-1919, vol. 2 of A History of Book Publishing in the United States [New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975],600-1). 58. Quoted in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 18501865, vol. 2 of A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938),401. Mott describes Harper's as aiming for a broader audience than the Atlantic in the nineteenth century-as "the great successful middle-class magazine" (391)-while the Atlantic "maintained a higher literary standard than its contemporaries" (494). The two were, nevertheless, the leading monthlies in the post-Civil War period (see, e.g., Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1865-1885, vol. 3 of A History of American Magazines [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938], 32).

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59. Review of volume 3 of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Godey's Lady's Book, February 1874, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 178. Writers for Godey's seemed especially willing to envision overlapping child and adult audiences: see the review of An Old-Fashioned Girl, June 1870,576; Editorial, November 1870,472; Editorial, September 1871,279. For similar sentiments see the review of Little Women, Part 1, Nation, 22 October 1868, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 81; review of Little Women, The Guiding Star, reprinted in Delamar, Louisa May Alcott, 146; review of Little Men, New York Times, 17 June 1871,2; review of Eight Cousins, Overland Monthly, November 1875, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 168-70; review of Silver Pitchers, Independent, 15 June 1876, 9. 60. Review of Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, National AntiSlavery Standard, 18 September 1869, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 26. Similarly, a reviewer for Godey's Lady's Book assumed a seamlessness between Alcott's literature for children and that for adults when she or he wrote of Work: "Miss Alcott has tried her hand at a long story upon her favorite subject. A girl starts off, from the uncongenial household of an uncle who does not like her, to make her way in the world" (Review of Work, Godey's Lady's Book, September 1873,284). 61. Review of Jack and Jill, Atlantic, January 1881, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 171. For reviews that draw similar lines see that of Rose in Bloom, Nation, 21 December 1876, and that of Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill, Nation, 16 November 1905, both reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 170; and the review of Rose in Bloom in Literary World, quoted in Richard 1. Darling, The Rise of Children's Book Reviewing in America, 1865-1881 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1968), 174. As late as 1911 a writer for the Atlantic could find "an inexcusable amount of love-making" in Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill (Katharine Fullerton Gerould, "Miss Alcott's New England," August 1911, 181). See also reviews in British periodicals: that of Eight Cousins, Athenaeum, 23 October 1875, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 167-68; and that of Proverb Stories, Saturday Review, 9 December 1882, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 180. 62. Review of Little Men, Harper's Monthly, August 1871, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 157-58; review of Little Women, Part 2, Harper's Monthly, August 1869, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 83. Richard L. Darling identifies Lyman Abbott as the Harper's reviewer of children's books beginning in November 1868 (Rise, 90). 63. Review of An Old-Fashioned Girl, Atlantic, June 1870, 752. 64. Review of Eight Cousins, Nation, 14 October 1875, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 165-66. James's view here echoes those of socially conservative sectarian reviewers, such as that for the Catholic World, who lamented that Rose of Eight Cousins has "a spirit of self-assertion ... which is only too true to nature in the average American girl. However reluctant we may be to acknowledge the fact, we cannot fail to see that our so-called progress has had a tendency to weaken veneration for age and respect for authority" (review of Eight Cousins, Catholic World, December 1875,431). For further discussion of James's role in the separating out of literature for children and literature for adults, see Felicity A. Hughes, "Children's Literature: Theory and Practice," ELH 45 (1978): 542-61; and Mavis Reimer, "'These two irreconcilable things-art and young girls': The Case of the Girls' School Story," in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys, ed. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in press). 65. Samuel S. Green, "Class Adaptation in the Selection of Books-The Fiction Question," Library Journal 5 (May 1880): 141. 66. "Two New England Women," Atlantic, March 1890,421. The editors of Godey's Lady's Book reveal themselves as not immune from some such thinking either, from thinking that writing for children is necessarily a lesser activity, when they note, in a commentary on Little Men, "This same power of intense realization and portraiture, exercised in a broader sphere, makes a great novelist, a George Eliot or a xlvii

Charlotte Bronte. But Miss Alcott has chosen to write for children .... " (Editorial, Gotley's Lady's Book, September 1871,279). 67. Review of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag and Proverb Stories, Critic, 2 December 1882, 326; review of A Garland for Girls, Critic, 11 February 1888, 67. 68. Review of Comic Tragedies, Critic, 16 December 1893, 395. 69. "Boston Letter," Critic, 29 July 1893, 75; "One of Miss Alcott's 'Little Women,'" Critic, 22 July 1893, 63. 70. "The Alcotts," Critic, 10 March 1888, 119. 71. Review of Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. Ednah D. Cheney, Critic, 25 October 1890, 202. 72. For accounts of this professionalization and of the emergence of American literature as a field, see, e.g., Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). 73. Alma J. Payne, Louisa May Alcott: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). 74. Such appraisals continue to appear in middlebrow journals, such as the Reader's Digest and Ladies' Home Journal, especially in anniversary years (1932, 1968), and in connection with media events, such as the release of a film or of a previously unpublished Alcott manuscript. 75. Unless one counts Roller's journalistic account of "When Jo Died." Or unless one counts the November 1932 issue of the Elementary English Review, an issue devoted to Alcott-but few literary scholars of the time would consult a journal addressed to elementary-school teachers. 76. An entry on Alcott did nevertheless appear in the 1928 Dictionary of American Biography (Caroline Ticknor, "Louisa May Alcott," Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928J, 1:141-42). 77. "Louisa May Alcott," in Library of the World's Best Literature, ed. Charles Dudley Warner; assoc. editors, Hamilton Wright Mabie, Lucia Gilbert Runkle, and George H. Warner (New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1896), 1:282-94; "Louisa May Alcott," in The International Library of Masterpieces, Literature, Art and Rare Manuscripts; History, Biography, Science, Philosophy, Poetry, the Drama, Travel, Adventure, Fiction, and Rare and Little-Known Literature from the Archives of the Great Libraries of the World, a Record of the Great Things that have been Said and Thought and Done from the Beginning of History, ed. Harry Thurston Peck; assoc. editors, Frank R. Stockton, Nathan Haskell Dole, Julian Hawthorne, and Caroline Ticknor (New York: International Bibliophile Society, 1901), 1:191-201. Peck effectively reproduces Warner's volume, reprinting the identical Alcott excerpts, yet registers the shift from a cultural elite composed of men of letters (such as Warner) to one that requires academic credentials: Peck registers the shift directly by stringing" A.M., Ph.D., L.H.D." after his name, and also indirectly, the excess verbiage on the title page suggesting some cultural anxiety. 78. "Louisa May Alcott," in The World's Best Literature, ed. John W. Cunliffe and Ashley H. Thorndyke, University edition (New York: Warner Library Company, 1917),283-95. 79. Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1917), 19 vols.; The Harvard Classics, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910), 50 vols. 80. Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, et al. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952),54 vols. Alcott is now represented, however, in such middlebrow "great books" collections as The World's 100 Greatest Books Audio Cassette Collection-in capsule form, so one can "[IJearn in a few weeks what would normally take a lifetime of study" (Wireless Music & Audio Collection, Fall 1995,69).

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INTRODUCTION

81. Figuring out a Bronson-to-Louisa ratio, or vice versa, allows some control for the fact that during the twentieth century scholarship devoted to just about every figure has increased a great deal: a Bronson-to-Louisa ratio enables one to gauge whether interest in Louisa is just a figment of this general trend or seems to outpace it. 82. We are grateful to Linnea Hendrickson for compiling information about dissertations. 83. In the CD ROM version of the MLA Bibliography, indexing works published between 1981 and May 1995, the ratio is about 4 to 1 in favor of Louisa. 84. Lewis Leary, Articles on American Literature, 1900-1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954), 8-9; Lewis Leary, comp., with the assistance of Carolyn Bartholet and Catharine Roth, Articles on American Literature, 1950-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1970), 12-13; Lewis Leary, comp., with John Auchard, Articles on American Literature, 1968-1975 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 11. Our ratios adjust for the fact that most of the Louisa entries in the third volume are actually from the 1930s. The bibliography seems not to have been updated since 1979. 85. Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (1900; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909),337. 86. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957; reprint, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1958); Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature: An Essay in Historical Criticism (1955; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1972). 87. Robert E. Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, Henry Seidel Canby, eds.; Howard Mumford Jones, Dixon Wecter, and Stanley T. Williams, assoc. eds, Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1383. 88. Payne, Louisa May Alcott, 38; Vernon Louis Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920, Completed to 1900 Only, vol. 3 of Main Currents in American Thought (1930; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931),50. 89. Wagenknecht, Cavalcade, 88. 90. Shepard, "The Mother of Little Women," 392. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. Shepard here and in what follows echoes, in a different key, the concerns of the biographer whose book he reviews: Katharine Anthony opens her preface by stating, "It has been my observation that all books written about the subject of this biography, whatever their nature and purpose, are classed as children's books .... I sincerely hope that the volume will not take the unfailing path to the children's department which seems to await all books on this subject" (Louisa May Alcott, vii). 91. William Troy, "Films: Little Women," Nation, 29 November 1933,630. 92. Carolyn Forrey, "The New Woman Revisited," Women's Studies 2 (1974), reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 172. See also Seon Manley and Susan Belcher, 0, Those Extraordinary Women! Or the Joys of Literary Lib (Philadelphia: Chiton Book Company, 1972), 171: "Louisa was the first to can sentiment-it carries a gourmet label-but it's sentiment all the same." 93. "Sentimental Journal," TLS, 31 May 1957, vii. Subsequent references in this paragraph are to this page. 94. Leona Rostenberg, "Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott," Bibliographical Society of America Papers 37 (2nd Quarter 1943), reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 43-50. 95. Madeleine B. Stern, "The First Appearance of a Little Women Incident," American Notes and Queries 3 (October 1943): 99-100; Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa May Alcott: Civil War Nurse," Americana 37 (April 1943): 296-325; Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa M. Alcott's Contributions to Periodicals, 1868-1888," More Books 18 (November 1943): 411-20; Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa Alcott, Trouper: Experiences in Theatricals, 1848-1880," New England Quarterly 16 (June 1943): 175-97;

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Madeleine B. Stern, "The Witch's Cauldron to the Family Hearth, Louisa M. Alcott's Literary Development, 1848-1868," More Books 18 (October 1943): 363-80. 96. Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa's Wonder Book: A Newly Discovered Alcott Juvenile," American Literature 26 (November 1954): 384-90. 97. Brophy, "A Masterpiece," 1. 98. The essays by Brophy and C. James (" Amy Had Golden Curls") are wholly devoted to Alcott, as is Elizabeth Janeway's "Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy," New York Times Book Review, 29 September 1968,42-46. Other essays address Alcott in part: e.g., Perri Klass, "Stories for Girls About Girls Who Write Stories," New York Times Book Review, 17 May 1992,1,36-39. 99. Cited in Richard Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 19601975," Critical Inquiry 10 (September 1983): 204-5. Ohmann acknowledges that the New York Review of Books would seem, since its founding in 1963, to be even more influential. Alcott has been less visible there, but still acknowledged: see Ann Douglas, "Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott," New York Review of Books, 28 September 1978, 60-63; Alison Lurie, "She Had It All," New York Review of Books, 2 March 1995, 3-5. 100. Karen Lindsay, "Louisa May Alcott: The Author of Little Women as Feminist," Women: A Journal of Liberation, 2 (Fall 1970), reprinted in Sexism and Youth, ed. Diane Gersoni-Stavn (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974),244-48. 101. Forrey, "The New Woman Revisited," 172-74. 102. See, e.g., Susan S. Lanser, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America," Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 415-41. 103. As Beverly Lyon Clark has also noted in "Fairy Godmothers or Wicked Stepmothers? The Uneasy Relationship of Feminist Theory and Children's Criticism," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 18 (Winter 1993): 174. 104. Ann B. Murphy, "The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in Little Women," Signs 15 (Spring 1990): 562-85. Feminist Studies, on the other hand, has been more receptive, publishing essays in 1979 (the Fetterley essay reprinted in this volume) and 1984; as was the now defunct International Journal of Women's Studies, publishing essays in 1982 and 1983. 105. Catharine R. Stimpson, "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March," New Literary History 21 (Autumn 1990): 957-76, reprinted in this volume. More recently Beverly Lyon Clark has addressed the genres that Alcott plays with in Little Men, in "Domesticating the School Story, Regendering a Genre: Alcott's Little Men," New Literary History 26 (1995): 325-44. 106. Frances Armstrong, "'Here Little, and Hereafter Bliss': Little Women and the Deferral of Greatness," American Literature 64 (September 1992): 453-74. 107. Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Taking Care: Some Women Novelists," Novel 6 (Fall 1972), reprinted in The Female Imagination (1975; reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1976), 121. Spacks reveals her more general attitude toward children when she says she "hesitates" to call Little Women a novel "since the narrative complexity is on the level of a child's story" (121). 108. Baym, Woman's Fiction, 296. But see Aiko Moro-oka's "Alcott in Japan: A Selected Bibliography," in the current volume, where she credits Baym's Woman's Fiction with providing an important impetus for revaluing Alcott in Japan. More recently Baym has written sensitively about Alcott-though necessarily briefly-in "The Rise of the Woman Author," in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),303-4. 109. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 64. 110. See Ann Boaden, "The Joyful Woman: Comedy as a Mode of Liberation in Little Women and Work," in Masks of Comedy, Papers Delivered at the Humanities Festival, 1978, Augustana College, ed. Ann Boaden (Rock Island, Ill.: Augustana College Library, 1980),47-57. INTRODUCTION

111. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, "Louisa May Alcott: The Influence of Little Women," in Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and New York, ed. Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), 2026. This essay has since been reprinted as "Alcott's Little Women," in Heilbrun's Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 140-47. 112. Nina Auerbach, "Austen and Alcott on Matriarchy: New Women or New Wives?" NovellO (Fall 1976), revised and reprinted in Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 55-73, 199-201, excerpt reprinted in this volume; Ann Douglas, "Mysteries"; Ann Douglas, Introduction, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (New York: Signet Classic, 1983), vii-xxvii, reprinted in this volume; Judith Fetterley, "Little Women: Alcott's Civil War," Feminist Studies 5 (Summer 1979): 369-83, reprinted in this volume; Showalter, Sister's Choice; Stimpson, "Reading for Love. " 113. Auerbach, "Austen and Alcott," 55-73, 199-201. 114. Fetterley, "Little Women," 369-83. 115. Fetterley, "Little Women," 370 passim; Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), xii passim. 116. Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine B. Stem (New York: William Morrow, 1975); Louisa May Alcott, Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine B. Stem (New York: William Morrow, 1976). Not that popular interest was left behind: soon after starting to publish the thrillers, Madeleine Stem was interviewed by Barbara Walters on the Today show and the story "Behind a Mask" was produced Off Broadway (Leona Rostenberg, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, 30 December 1994, A30). A sign of the interest generated by Alcott's thrillers is that other stories, or combinations of previously published stories, have appeared in five subsequent volumes-not to mention other collections of fairy tales, of selected fiction, of miscellaneous writings. 117. Nina Auerbach, Afterword to Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (New York: Bantam, 1983),461-70; Bedell, Introduction; Elaine Showalter, Introduction to Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, with notes by Siobhan Kilfeather and Vinca Showalter (New York: Penguin, 1989), vii-xxviii; Valerie Alderson, Introduction to Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, the World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii-xxvii. 118. Douglas, Introduction, vii-xxvii. 119. Herbert L. Smith, Jr., "Farmhouse Fantasia," Architectural Record 174 (Mid-April 1986): 130. 120. Patricia McLaughlin, "Too Old to Have Long Hair?" Providence Journal-Bulletin, 13 October 1994, C3-4. 121. Linda K. Kerber, "Can a Woman Be an Individual? The Limits of Puritan Tradition in the Early Republic," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25 (1983): 165-78. 122. Jackie DeFazio, Afterword, SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteen, and the Confidence Gap, by Peggy Orenstein (New York: Doubleday, 1994),277. We are grateful to Susan Laird for bringing this passage to our attention. 123. Cheri Register, "Letting the Angel Die," Hurricane Alice 3 (1986): 1-4. 124. See, e.g., the brochure: Charles Brock, Winslow Homer (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1995; reprint, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1996), n. pag. 125. Charles Strickland, Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott, foreword by Robert Coles (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985);,Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and "Little Women- (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), revised as A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

Ii

126. Payne, Louisa May Alcott; Ruth K. MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Twayne, 1983); Joy A. Marsella, The Promise of Destiny: Children and Women in the Short Stories of Louisa May Alcott (Westport: Greenwood, 1983); Stern, ed., Critical Essays; Delamar, Louisa May Alcott. 127. The current volume reprints a somewhat different version of Keyser's chapter on Little Women. 128. See Susan K. Harris, "Narrative Control and Thematic Radicalism in Work and The Silent Partner," in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 173-96,226-28; Ann R. Shapiro, "Sisterhood and the Adamless Eden: Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (1873)," in Unlikely Heroines: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Woman Question (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 53-69; Mary Rigsby, "'So Like Women!': Louisa May Alcott's Work and the Ideology of Relations," in Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901, ed. Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 109-27; Judy Simons, "The Double Life: The Journal of Louisa May Alcott," in Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1990), 106-27; Elizabeth Langland, "Female Stories of Experience: Alcott's Little Women in Light of Work," in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), 112-27, 333-34; James D. Wallace, "Where the Absent Father Went: Alcott's Work," in Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, ed. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989),259-74; Jane Silverman Van Buren, " Little Women: A Study in Adolescence and Alter Egos," in The Modernist Madonna: Semiotics of the Maternal Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 96-123; Margaret R. Higonnet, "Civil Wars and Sexual Territories," in Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, ed. Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Squier Merrill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 80-96; John Limon, "Family Likenesses: War in Women's Words," in Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 183-225; Amy Schrager Lang, '''A Loving League of Sisters': Class, Race, Gender, and Religion in Louisa May Alcott's Work," in Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 101-22. 129. The New England Quarterly has long been receptive to essays addressing Alcott, having published some seven essays between 1938 and now, including two pieces by Stern already cited, "Louisa Alcott, Trouper" and "Louisa M. Alcott: An Appraisal," and, recently, Natania Rosenfeld, "Artists and Daughters in Louisa May Alcott's Diana and Persis," New England Quarterly 64 (March 1991): 3-21. Essays in the other journals include Glenn Hendler, "The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel," American Literary History 3 (Winter 1991): 685706; Kathleen Margaret Lant and Angela M. Estes, "The Feminist Redeemer: Louisa Alcott's Creation of the Female Christ," Christianity and Literature 40 (Spring 1991): 223-53; Martha Ackmann, "Legacy Guide to American Women Writers' Homes (II)," Legacy 2 (Spring 1985): 10-12; Lynette Carpenter, "'Did They Never See Anyone Angry Before?': The Sexual Politics of Self-Control in Louisa May Alcott's 'A Whisper in the Dark,'" Legacy 3 (Fall 1986): 31-41; Jane E. Schultz, "Embattled Care: Narrative Authority in Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches," Legacy 9 (Fall 1992): 104-18; Donna M. Campbell, "Sentimental Conventions and Self-Protection: Little Women and The Wide, Wide World," Legacy 11 (1994): 118-29; and Steven Mailloux, "The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century America," boundary 217 (Spring 1990): 133-57. 130. Richard H. Brodhead, "Starting Out in the 1860s: Alcott, Authorship, and the Postbellum Literary Field," in Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and

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INTRODUCTION

Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 69-106. 131. Jerry Griswold, "Bosom Enemies: Little Women," in Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America's Classic Children's Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 156-66. 132. Charles Frey and John Griffith, "Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, " in The Literary Heritage of Childhood: An Appraisal of Children's Classics in the Western Tradition (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 123-30. 133. Margery Fisher, "March Girls," in Who's Who in Children's Books: A Treasury of the Familiar Characters of Childhood (New York: Henry Holt, 1975), 197-98. 134. Lynne Vallone, "The Daughters of the Republic: Girls' Play in NineteenthCentury American Juvenile Fiction," in Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 106-34; Claudia Nelson, "Care in Feeding: Vegetarianism and Social Reform in Alcott's America," in The Girl's Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 11-33. 135. Carol Gay, "Little Women at the Movies," in Children's Novels and the Movies, ed. Douglas Street (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983),28-38. 136. Anne Hollander, "Reflections on Little Women," Children's Literature 9 (1981): 28-39. 137. Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant, "Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women," Children's Literature 17 (1989): 98-123. 138. Excerpt from Work: A Story of Experience, in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter, et aI., 2nd ed. (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994), 2:71-81; excerpt from Work, in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985),937-47. See also, e.g., "The Brothers," in Civil War Women: American Women Shaped by Conflict in Stories by Alcott, Chopin, Welty and Others, ed. Frank McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh, and Martin Greenberg (Little Rock, Ark.: August House, 1988), 12-30; "A Day," in The Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers: From Anne Bradstreet to Louisa May Alcott, 1650-1865, ed. Katharine M. Rogers (New York: Meridian, 1991),505-16; "How I Went Out to Service," in Wife or Spinster: Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women, ed. Jessic;1 Amanda Salmonson, Isabelle D. Waugh, and Charles Waugh, introd. Deborah Pickman Clifford (Camden, Me.: Yankee, 1991), 155-67. In less scholarly contexts, and especially in contexts addressing children, Alcott's children's literature may appear: see, e.g., "Eva's Visit to Fairy Land," in Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Mark I. West (Hamden, Ct.: Archon, 1989), 124-36; "The Children's Joke," in The Oxford Book of Children's Stories, ed.Jan Mark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 123-33; excerpts from Little Women and Good Wives, in Such Devoted Sisters, ed. Shena Mackay (Wakefield, R.I.: Moyer Bell, 1994), 188-212. A recent collection of essays for college students reprints a selection from Little Women, the comparable section of Laurie Lawlor's novelization of the 1994 movie, Sicherman's "Reading Little Women," and C. james's "Amy Had Golden Curls": see The Press of Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age, ed. Julie Bates Dock (Boston: Bedford, 1996),65-97. 139. But see Cornelia Meigs's Louisa M. Alcott and the American Family Story (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1971) and Gillian Avery'S ground-breaking discussion of the place of domestic fiction in American children's literature in "Classic Family Stories," in Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 168-73. 140. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy have also been active in tht: field, especially in a bibliographic and editorial mode, and with attention mostly focused on sensation stories, letters, and journals.

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141. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (1868-69; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989), 3. 142. Personal communication, fall 1995. 143. Laurie Hillyer Armstrong, "Louisa May Alcott: A November Birthday," Child Life, November 1932, 550-51; John T. Winterich, "One Hundred Good Novels: Little Women," collations by David A. Randall, Publishers' Weekly, 17 June 1939, reprinted in Critical Essays, ed. Stern, 87.

liv

I N T ROD U C T ION

LITTLE WOMEN AND

THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

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CARTOON LITTLE WOMEN: MEG, AMY, BETH, JO AND

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