Pod Insights The Book Club 19. Little Women: The Secret Sadness of a Classic About this episode How did Louisa May Alcott break social and literary conventions? Is Little Women the first coming of age story in a novel? And, what do Tabby and Dominic think of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaption?
Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Little Women, the world it was born of, and the novel itself.
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Transcript 15,573 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:37 Speaker 03 Another banging of the street doors sent the girls to the table eager for breakfast.
2:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Merry Christmas, little daughters. I am glad you began at once, and I hope you'll keep on. But I want to say one word before we sit down. Not far away from here, there lies a poor woman with a little newborn baby. Six children, huddled in a one-bed, to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There's nothing to eat over there, and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?
3:13 Speaker 03 They're unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour. And for a minute, no one spoke. "Only a minute," for Jo exclaimed impetuously. "I'm so glad you came before we began." "May I go and help carry the things to the poor little children?" asked Beth eagerly. "I shall take the cream and the muffins," added Amy, heroically giving out the articles she most liked. Meg was already covering the buckwheats and piling the bread into one big plate.
3:42 Dominic Sandbrook? "I thought you'd do it," said Mrs. March, smiling as if satisfied. "You shall all go and help me, and when we come back, we shall have bread and milk for breakfast and make it up at dinnertime."
3:55 Speaker 03 They were soon ready, and the procession set out. Fortunately, it was early, and they went through back streets, so few people saw them, and no one laughed at the funny party. A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm. How the big eyes stared, and the blue lips smiled as the girls went in.
4:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Ach, mein Gott! It is good angels come to us!
4:27 Speaker 03 Cried the poor woman, crying for joy. Funny angels in hoods and midens, said Joe, and set them laughing. So, hello everybody and welcome to the book club. That was from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and it's based on her own life and family. And it was first published in two parts in eighteen sixty eight and eighteen sixty nine. And it's set in New England in the eighteen sixties during and then following the American Civil War. And we'll be digging into the historical context and the life of Louisa May Alcott herself in a bit. And it follows the kind of the development, the growing up of the Four March Sisters as they go from being
5:10 Speaker 03 children to teenagers to women. And it's all about kind of the challenges of that transition of leaving home. It's the ultimate coming of age story. And that's why it's widely considered to be one of the originators of what we now call young adult fiction, YA. And it was a huge success upon its publication. And it's been further popularised today by a series of movies, but especially Greta Gerwig's, well, most recently Greta Gerwig's two thousand and nineteen adaptation, starring Saoirse Ronan, Timothy Chalamet and Florence Pugh. And we'll be rating that movie, won't we, at the very end?
5:47 Dominic Sandbrook? We absolutely will. Hello, everybody. I hope you all enjoyed my performance as Marmee.
5:50 Speaker 03 I certainly did.
5:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, well, Tabby, it was your idea that we do that reading and you chose a reading which I would look absolutely ridiculous, not unfamously.
5:57 Speaker 03 No, I'm just always keen to push you, you know, push you to the limits of your artistic abilities.
6:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Thank you, and you certainly did. Yeah, so I first read Little Women when I was quite small myself, I think, probably about ten or eleven. But it now strikes me that I couldn't possibly have read the original. I must have read some abridged edition or something because there's no way I'd have slogged through five hundred pages of this sort of stuff at that age. But I remember really enjoying it. I enjoyed it at the time, which absolutely blows my mind now.
6:28 Speaker 03 But I was the same as you, I was about eleven. I can remember the copy of it and it had this pink cover with a shoe on it or something. And it was very small. So then when we started re- Reading it for this episode, I was shocked and appalled to discover.
6:41 Dominic Sandbrook? How long it was.
6:41 Speaker 03 That it was massive and also maybe not as exciting as I remembered.
6:46 Dominic Sandbrook? I remembered it exciting, a lot of japery.
6:48 Speaker 03 Well, there is much japery. There's, there's great bonhomie and there's great japery.
6:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but there's probably more moralizing in the full edition than there was in the children's version that I originally read. However, we'll just outline the plot for those people who've not read it or have not seen the film. So she says to Abby, there were the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, all of whom you performed magnificently.
7:10 Speaker 03 Thank you.
7:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Introduction. And they live in Concord, Massachusetts in this kind of genteel poverty. Their father is an army chaplain and he's away with the Union Army in the American Civil War, as you said. So the two older girls, Meg, who is sort of traditionally feminine, she loves dresses and she loves the idea of being married and all of this. She's working as a governess and the next girl down, who is Jo, who is the heart of the novel, really. Jo is headstrong. She's a tomboy. She's clever. She loves reading and writing. She writes all these plays and stories and things. And she is working as a companion to their intimidating but very rich relative, Aunt March. Then there's the two younger girls. They are Beth, who's very sweet and gentle.
7:55 Dominic Sandbrook? And there is Amy, who is the spoiled baby.
7:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Who, she's a bit of a heartbreaker, isn't she? She loves art, but, and she's very, she's a little bit bumptious, I suppose.
8:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, she's got youngest childhood syndrome for sure.
8:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely, she does. Their mother, who they call Marmy, and Marmy's job is basically to turn them into good Christian girls.
8:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:16 Dominic Sandbrook? So in the, certainly in the opening chapters of the book, Marmy tries to instill in them a series of lessons in how to be charitable. As we saw, they're giving away their Christmas breakfast to a German family, teaching them how to overcome their jealousy or their hot temper or their vanity or their avarice or whatever. But by and large, the girls get on pretty well. They sometimes squabble. They go to parties, they perform plays and they write stories for each other and they have a little club based on the Pickwick Club from the Pickwick Papers. They have a mate called Theodore Lawrence, Laurie, who in the film is Timothy Chalamet, and he lives nearby with his uncle. He's going to be very rich. He becomes a part of
8:57 Dominic Sandbrook? the club and he becomes great pals with tomboy Joe. And all kinds of fun things happen and also sad things. So Beth falls ill from scarlet fever and that will blight her the rest of her life.
9:09 Speaker 03 In the second half of the book, it's a much more grown up version of the girls. So Meg is courted by and then eventually marries their neighbour, John, who is just stimulating.
9:20 Dominic Sandbrook? You don't like John, do you?
9:21 Speaker 03 I'm not a big fan of John, but more on that later. Joe is devastated by this because she feels like this is the first sign that her family is going to gradually get broken up as the women increasingly leave and are married. Amy goes to Europe with her wealthy March aunts and kind of becomes this queen of society. Joe goes to New York where she works as a governess to try and earn money, but she's also writing a lot, these kind of thrilling sensation stories. And there she grows close to a very eccentric German professor called Friedrich. And she eventually stops writing, actually, when he criticises her stories. She comes home and Laurie, you know, her dearest friend, he proposes to
10:03 Speaker 03 her. Beth then, and this is a big spoiler, tragically dies. And Joe realises that she's kind of lonely and that this life that she would always wanted for herself maybe isn't going to make her that happy. And she watches her sisters all coupling up and going out and claiming their own versions of independence. So what will become of Joe, we will discover after the break. But before then, let's dig into the historical context a little bit of the book.
10:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, so Little Women is one of those totemic 19th century novels, one of the most important 19th century novels, I would say, in the way that it shaped the imagination of generations of readers. A little bit like Tom Brown's School Days, I think, for boys, boarding school story, massively important for boys in England. Little Women is the equivalent of that for girls and young women in America. And it sets, as you mentioned, in the civil war in a place In America, in Massachusetts, somewhere that is kind of steeped in history and in sort of identity of America, the idea of Americanism and American individualism and so on. So this is the cradle of the American Revolution. And then later on, the transcendentalist movement, which we'll come on to.
11:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And the book also reflects, I think, the intellectual currents of sort of mid-century America, and particularly mid-century New England. So an interest in social reform, you know, a kind of Christian piety that absolutely runs through the book. Abolitionism, social activism, temperance. So, you know, this is a do-gooding family, surrounded by other kind of do-gooding people. A massive interest in education and in schools and so on. And Louisa May Alcott is reflecting a lot of that. What she's also reflecting is a profound interest in the kind of nuclear family.
11:50 Speaker 03 Definitely.
11:51 Dominic Sandbrook? In the idea of marriage as the kind of heart and the the foundation stone of bourgeois middle class existence. I mean, this is a book that would have appealed overwhelmingly to middle class readers who are interested in giving their girls, in particular, their their little women, a kind of primer in how you how you grow up, how you make your way in society. What does the new world of 19th century capitalist kind of bourgeois America have to offer a young woman? And how do you find your niche within it? How do you reconcile your artistic ambitions or your individualistic ambitions with the demands of a society in which women have very, very strictly identified roles?
12:34 Dominic Sandbrook? And Louisa May Alcott, and indeed her avatar in the book, Jo, are kind of pushing against that a little bit. They're challenging it in sort of subtle ways, but they don't want to undermine the established order completely, I wouldn't say.
12:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:47 Dominic Sandbrook? And this takes us, I guess, to the author herself. So the girls in Little Women, the March family, are very clearly based on Alcott's own family. So she comes from this family. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1832. She is the second of four daughters, as Jo is. They're a kind of genteel, high-minded family, but poor, actually poorer than the March family.
13:09 Speaker 03 Than the Marches, yeah.
13:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Her mum is a social worker and her dad, who is unquestionably the biggest influence on her, and not necessarily in a very good way. So his name is Amos Bronson Olcott, and he is a transcendentalist. And what that means, a lot of listeners won't know, I guess, what a transcendentalist is. Transcendentalism was this movement in mid-century America, particularly New England, that was a sort of spin-off of the Romantic movement.
13:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:34 Dominic Sandbrook? And it's based on, it's associated with people like Ralph Walde or Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. And it's basically about, you know, you look deep into your own soul to find out, you know, the meaning of life, I suppose. It's idealistic, it's individualistic. The transcendentalists believe about harmony with nature, rather than the Romantics. They believe that human beings are inherently good. They're very, very, very high-minded. They're interested in all kinds of, you know, they're sort of pacifist and vegetarian adjacent, I suppose.
14:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:07 Dominic Sandbrook? And.
14:07 Speaker 03 A lot of social reform involved. So I mean, if anyone who has listened to our Frankenstein episode, this is quite in the realm of Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin. Definitely shades of that.
14:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that's a good point. There's a sort of radicalism to them. There's a kind of Christian radicalism to them, I suppose. And Bronson, her dad, is massively into all this. So Louisa, she grows up and she's influenced by it too. Rather like Mary Shelley was in awe of her father, William Godwin, she is in awe of her father, isn't she? She kind of worships him. Didn't she call him the modern Plato?
14:40 Speaker 03 She did. She called him the modern Plato. But a lot of his kind of more successful and now more famous contemporaries, like for instance Emerson, he called Bronson a tedious archangel because, you know, like Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott is growing up surrounded by, you know, some of the great kind of thinkers of the day, or certainly of this movement. But yeah, he definitely was kind of the most mediocre of the bunch, a big do-gooder for sure. Some of the experiments he carried out.
15:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, tell us about the apples. I know you like the apples business.
15:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, I do. I love a jape involving apples. So he'd carry out these kind of social experiments on his daughters. And one of them is kind of referred to as the drama of the apple. And this is where he was trying to test his, he thought that women should be selfless and obedient and kind of meek and mild. And he was trying to test his daughters' obedience by leaving prohibited apples, full of kind of Garden of Eden metaphorical symbolic significance there. So he'd leave them out where his daughters could see them. And Anna, so this is Louise May Alcott's older sister on whom Meg is based, she was, you know, the perfect woman. She didn't touch the prohibited apples. Whereas Louisa went in and, you know,
15:52 Speaker 03 ate herself silly, the naughty, naughty girl. You know, this was to prove that Louisa was kind of less obedient, more headstrong than she ought to be. Some things I've read say that he was kind of, in spite of being utterly deranged, he was, he was on the whole a loving parent.
16:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Loving in his own way, I think.
16:08 Speaker 03 Loving in his own way.
16:09 Dominic Sandbrook? He's also, he's useless because he, he doesn't make any money at all.
16:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:13 Dominic Sandbrook? And he basically, they live on charity effectively, though, of his friends, his family and whatnot. He sets up a kind of educational school, doesn't he?
16:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's very alternative. It's kind of like the Waldorf School of its day or something like that.
16:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, or Steiner School or something.
16:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, and his daughters went there.
16:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And in some ways very admirable. So for example, I mentioned they were abolitionists. So they get, it becomes very controversial because they basically have a mixed race child at the school. And lots of people say, oh, this is terrible stuff, educating such a person alongside white children. But at the same time, he has some unconventional teaching methods. So did you see this thing about how he would lie down or he'd do gymnastics to teach people how to read? So you'd basically
16:55 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:56 Dominic Sandbrook? contort your body into the shape of the letters of the alphabets?
16:59 Speaker 03 But also, this is what Jo's father does in the book to teach her nephew and niece how to read. So you like lie on the ground and you do the letter A or whatever it may be.
17:09 Dominic Sandbrook? In the book, it describes them lying on the ground to act out a W.
17:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:13 Dominic Sandbrook? But I think it'd be very difficult to act out a W. You don't have enough legs.
17:16 Speaker 03 I'd struggle to act out a W. Surely you have to do some sort of a worm, but freeze yourself in in the act of doing the worm.
17:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Or an N or something. How would you do that?
17:25 Speaker 03 Really tough. I think you need help for sure.
17:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think it's difficult.
17:29 Speaker 03 For this and and, you know, the, you know, his attitude to abolitionism and also because he was very open with the children in ways that at the time were considered kind of outrageous. I could speak about circumcision and birth and things like that.
17:42 Dominic Sandbrook? It's insane. Why would you speak if you've got four girls? Why would you be giving them lectures about circumcision?
17:47 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, also, it wasn't just the four girls. It was a classroom full of like six year old children. But because of this, the the school was shut down and the girls were educated at home. And then he sets up a commune.
17:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Tabby, I'm going to come out and say, if you're going to set up a commune, don't call it Fruitlands.
18:02 Speaker 03 I know, I know.
18:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Stupid name for a commune.
18:03 Speaker 03 Terrible name, but I suppose it's meant to sound all kind of Garden of Eden-y and lovely or whatever. But so he sets this up in 1843. By 1844, it's it's done. It's gone. And this was meant to be a progressive utopian commune. And it's interesting because it was it was considered like an experiment. And in Little Women, the word experiment is used a lot. The girls are constantly experimenting with their moral codes, I guess. But it promoted veganism and no animal labour, no property ownership. So it's very much ahead of its time. I suspect maybe you wouldn't have been a fan of living at Fruit Fields.
18:40 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a bit Zach Polanski for me, to be honest.
18:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, the veganism would not sit well with you.
18:44 Dominic Sandbrook? No animal labour. I mean, I'm all in favour of animal labour. I love animal labour.
18:48 Speaker 03 But as with so many of these kind of utopian ideals or dreams, it's shut down because of internal feuding and terrible living conditions.
18:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's always the way.
18:58 Speaker 03 Louisa May Alcott humorously referred to it as an apple slump. But I think at the end of the novel, the marches are kind of living in close proximity and they come together once a year to pick apples and. Be happy and share, break bread. There is something of that in this, in this experiment.
19:15 Dominic Sandbrook? I think two things. I think one, the March family themselves, the girls as they're growing up, there's a sense of them creating almost a little commune of their own.
19:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:24 Dominic Sandbrook? This little world of their own that's sealed off from the outside world with its own codes, with its own rules, all of that kind of thing. And then exactly as you say, at the end of the book, there's a sense that they are part now of some very happy collective community. You know, there's a school, there's all, they're all sort of laughing and gambling in the fields together and all this sort of thing.
19:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. And also because it's almost as though the girls that do have their time going out into the world, they come home and they cut off the outside world and they live in this little sort of female paradise or whatever it may be. But this brings us to another major influence from Alcott's own life in the book. And this is her mother. She is called Abba May Alcott and she is the inspiration for Marmee. Although interestingly, in later editions, Marmee was made quite kind of tall and genteel and slim. But the original Marmee in the book was kind of plump and homely, but they wanted to make her more feminine, I guess.
20:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
20:18 Speaker 03 And I think she sounds like a wonderful woman.
20:20 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm going to betray my hand. In the book, Marmee is very boring, I think.
20:24 Speaker 03 She just turns everything into a moral lesson. I think one of the real low points in the book is when the girls do this lovely thing where they come home and they tell. And this is where they tell their sisters about something interesting that happened to them during the day. And it's Marmee's turn to tell. And she kind of tells this thinly veiled moralistic story in which all the girls, they do something better and they accept that they're lot and they're happy and they're good. And it's just dreadful. But Alcott's own mother sounds wonderful. She encouraged Louisa's kind of more imaginative side and she encouraged her to write and read widely. And she would read them all very romantic stories about kind of witchcraft, a far cry from realism.
21:05 Speaker 03 And she was supposed to have been loving and sympathetic and Louisa adored her. She dedicated many of her books to her and she was devoted to her and stayed with her until, until the end of her mother's life.
21:17 Dominic Sandbrook? But on the issue of Louisa, so Louisa is the second daughter, as Jo is in the book. And she is sort of cast, the role that she's given is to be the difficult daughter, headstrong, impetuous, tomboyish.
21:28 Speaker 03 They called her topsy turvy.
21:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, topsy turvy. So she's turning the world upside down.
21:34 Speaker 03 Eating apples.
21:35 Dominic Sandbrook? She's not exactly unnecessarily eating apples. She's behaving in an unconventional way. And Louisa clearly struggles with that a bit because she, while she's challenging the expectations of her elders, at the same time, she wants them to, you know, she craves their approval and their love and stuff, as people so often do. And didn't she write that her great ambition in life was not to be a great writer, but to be a good daughter?
22:01 Speaker 03 And that's very Jo, this, this like tension between wanting to go out and write and be independent and kind of the tug of home and family and duty. And she did spend a lot of her life trying to earn money for her family, essentially, because her father was so useless. So she published poems, stories, essays. But she also worked as a, as a domestic servant for a while and would sew to earn money. She was a seamstress.
22:27 Dominic Sandbrook? And she volunteered as a nurse in the Civil War for the Union Army.
22:30 Speaker 03 Yes. So this is kind of the, the great, the, the only really bold thing I would say that she did in her life and the only time that she really left home.
22:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm. But it didn't last long, did it? She went, I mean, it was bad luck. She got typhoid almost straight away, six weeks and was sent back home again. And actually she never recovered from the typhoid that she got. Her health was blighted afterwards, rather like Beth's health in the book is, is blighted by her scarlet fever. But she ends up writing, um, she, that inspires her to write her first really successful book, which is Hospital Sketches, which was 1863. She's one of these people who is just a born writer. She loves reading. She wrote plays and stories when she was little and she never stops when she grows up. What her real interest is in is something we've already done on this show, which is sensation fiction, like Wilkie Collins style,
23:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Woman in White style, adventure stories and thrillers and stories about witches and pirates and all of this, which Jo is interested in, in the book.
23:30 Speaker 03 Instinctively, this is what Jo writes all of her life.
23:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
23:33 Speaker 03 For her sisters, the plays she writes is all kind of poison and vengeance and incest and.
23:37 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a sort of tragedy, I think, both for Louisa and indeed for Jo, that it's, this is frowned upon. And people say, oh, gosh, this is very beneath you. You should be writing improving stories. The funny thing is that she writes a lot of these stories under these insane pseudonyms, non de blume. So Minerva Moody, which was one of the names she used, is such a J K Rowling name.
23:58 Speaker 03 I was about to say that. They are such Harry Potter names.
24:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Aren't they? I mean, Minerva Moody. Well, there's Mad Eye Moody, isn't there? And Minerva McGonagall. Oh, my God.
24:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:07 Dominic Sandbrook? It's basically like they got together and had a daughter.
24:09 Speaker 03 We've worked it out. This is like the Da Vinci Code at the heart of the Harry Potter books.
24:13 Dominic Sandbrook? What about this one? Aranthie Bluggage.
24:16 Speaker 03 Brilliant. Love it.
24:17 Dominic Sandbrook? That's a brilliant name.
24:18 Speaker 03 Tribulation Periwinkle. That's very Dickens, though, isn't it? Tribulation Periwinkle.
24:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Aranthie Bluggage, I'm going to use that, I think. It's time to check into her hotel under that name.
24:29 Speaker 03 You should. You should start writing some really left wing pieces about.
24:32 Dominic Sandbrook? All my pieces of left wing, Tabby, what are you saying? Let's get into how she writes Little Women.
24:36 Speaker 03 It's not like she writes that because she has a burning desire to write it. She's actually kind of pressured into writing it. So in September 1867, her publisher, Thomas Niles, encourages her to write a girl's story. And these were very popular at the time. They're kind of moralistic stories intended to bridge the gap between childhood and womanhood. And they encourage obedience and marriage rather than independence. And as this 19th century critic, Edward Salmon, wrote, they were meant, and you mentioned this earlier, you know, about basically feeding young women with kind of the morals that they need for later life. So he said, they were intended to provide the mental food for the future wives and mothers. So right from the outset, this moralistic, allegorical kind of framework is woven into
25:20 Speaker 03 Little Women. And that bleeds through, for me, anyway, on every page, I think.
25:24 Dominic Sandbrook? And here's the surprising thing about it. Louisa May Elcourt didn't really want to do it. She actually said at the time, and I quote, "I don't enjoy this sort of thing. I never liked girls or knew many except my sisters. But I queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." And she's effectively writing it under duress. I mean, this is really, really
25:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Surprising. She's writing this book under G R S to please her father. Who, as we already said, I think is, I don't, I don't approve of him at all. Her father wants to get this bloke's publishing company to publish his own book of second rate transcendentalist essays.
26:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:06 Dominic Sandbrook? And so his, her father basically says to her, and this is unbelievable, he actually says this explicitly, they want a book of 200 pages or more. He obviously wishes to become your publisher as well as mine.
26:16 Speaker 03 Yeah. Crucially, as well as mine.
26:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Write this book and then hopefully I'll get a book deal out of it as well.
26:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. The thing is though, she had actually been planning to write for a while, a satirical novel about her family's hardships and her father's kind of oddities and these visions that he claimed to have had. But it was to be called The Pathetic Family, or The Cost of an Idea, or The Forlornites. The Forlornites. That's what I'll call my future autobiography, I think. But instead, you know, under pressure from her father, she turned this idea into the book that her publisher had asked for. But she shifts the vision from her father. So she sends the father in the book off to the civil war. He doesn't really have a big part to play, certainly in the first half of the book. And shifts the focus onto herself and her sisters. And so the focus is really sisterhood and the bond between the daughters and their mother.
27:07 Speaker 03 And it's kind of this little female community that they have. But her plan originally is only to take the family through one year. And so in June 1868, she sent her publisher Niles the first 12 chapters and both acknowledged, acknowledged right from the offset that they were very dull.
27:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
27:27 Speaker 03 Surely not.
27:28 Dominic Sandbrook? This is another of the funny details about the book. So basically, when I was about 12 chapters in, I remember I said to you, Tabby, this is so boring.
27:36 Speaker 03 Nothing happens.
27:37 Dominic Sandbrook? And the mad thing is that Louise, I mean, herself agrees. And so this is really boring so far. But anyway, she keeps going. She finishes the story halfway through the edition that we have.
27:49 Speaker 03 So she thinks like it's all done and finished with the return of Mr. March to the family home and they have this lovely, very jolly family reunion. But Niles says, could I get a little bit more from you? Like maybe one more chapter, just kind of looking into the girl's future, you know, what, what might happen to them?
28:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
28:07 Speaker 03 So she writes this extra chapter in which the older sister, Meg, gets engaged to the dullest man in America, their next door neighbour, John. And kind of there's the, the promise that there might be more to come. So she actually says something like, and should this, you know, book sell well, you know, you'll hear more about the, the March family and their fortunes. And Niles was delighted.
28:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, he said, well, he was, he basically wanted us to do more because the first part comes out in October 1868. It is a huge success and completely overshadows her father's long anticipated book of transcendentalist essays.
28:41 Speaker 03 But as we will see, he uses that to his advantage later on, but
28:44 Dominic Sandbrook? He does.
28:45 Speaker 03 We'll get to that, we'll get to that.
28:46 Dominic Sandbrook? He does. And crazily, some people complained that it was too licentious because basically there's a scene in which they put on plays at Christmas.
28:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:56 Dominic Sandbrook? High spirited plays and Jo, does Jo dress up as a boy? Is that what the issue is?
29:00 Speaker 03 Jo dresses up as a boy and she rescues, or, or, or does she rescue Meg from the kind of, who's a princess from the tower and the illusionist kind of, oh, Jo is her sister's lover. And it really, this is a wholesome book at the best of times, but this is one of the most wholesome scenes in a very wholesome book. So it's absolutely insane.
29:19 Dominic Sandbrook? That people complained, yeah.
29:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, that people complained. And then Niles wrote to Louise May Alcott, why will people be so very good? And this is slightly what I think about the whole book.
29:28 Dominic Sandbrook? So anyway, that it's a hit despite the fact that Sunday School librarians didn't like this business about Jo dressing up as a bloke. Alcott then starts on the second half. She writes like a steam engine, we are told. So she writes a chapter a day. She doesn't think it'll do as well as the first bit, but she's amazed because in the, the first month, so April 1869, the second half is published, they sell 13,000 copies in the first month. By the end of 1869, she has made a lot of money in royalties, $8,500. So that could be what, two, more than 200,000? Dollars, I think, in today's money.
30:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:01 Dominic Sandbrook? And suddenly, the fortunes of her family, which was always really struggling to stay above the poverty line, are completely transformed. And her shameless father now goes around introducing herself to everybody as the father of little women. Once again, he's taking all the credit for it.
30:19 Speaker 03 He's a great man.
30:20 Dominic Sandbrook? So what's gone into the book, Tabby? Because there's a lot of different influences on there. She, Louisa May Alcott, was extremely well read. She loved, for example, some other people we've talked about on this show, which are the Brontë sisters.
30:33 Speaker 03 She loves the Brontë. She loves Elizabeth Gaskell. She loves Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë, which we spoke about in our very first episode.
30:41 Dominic Sandbrook? In Wuthering Heights.
30:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. She loves Mary Wollstonecraft, who is the mother of Mary Shelley. So that's interesting. So many of these, the female writers that we've done on this show are great readers themselves. So this is also true of Louisa May Alcott. And she actually saw herself and her family as kind of, as the American Brontë family. And that's kind of interesting. And you can sort of see that, overbearing intellectual father, a group of very close sisters. But then there's another major influence, and this is the kind of allegorical stories that Bronson would read to his daughters when they were young. And these kind of, they're full of moral lessons. And there's one in particular that has huge influence. It's all over the book. And this is Bunyan's Pilgrims' Progress.
31:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So that was published in the 17th century. It's arguably, I mean, nobody reads it now. Have you ever tried to read it, Tabby? Surely not.
31:30 Speaker 03 No, I haven't. I haven't even.
31:32 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, I've kind of looked at it and I just thought, I could live for a million years and I'd never read this book. But it was hugely influential. It is one of the sort of four or five most influential books ever written in English. Give us so many phrases and so many concepts. So the idea of Vanity Fair comes from.
31:51 Speaker 03 Yes, because it's the stages, isn't it? There's something of kind of like, it's the opposite almost of kind of Dante's Inferno or something like you have ten different stages of temptation, isn't it? So the early chapters of Little Women, be that, as you say, Vanity Fair, when Meg goes to a ball and is tempted by lovely things and her own prettiness, that is based on a chapter in Pilgrim's Progress.
32:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly so. So Pilgrim's Progress is the story of a bloke called Christian who advances through a series of trials and temptations to get to the celestial city. And actually, Little Women, you know, we mentioned that Louise May Alcott thought the first 12 chapters, she thought herself that they were dull. One of the reasons they're so dull is they're so obviously modelled on Pilgrim's Progress. The very first chapter is called Playing Pilgrims. And basically, you prod through a series of trials and tribulations in which the girls have to be charitable and kind and self-denying and self-effacing and all of these kinds of things. So that's obviously a colossal influence.
32:49 Speaker 03 You know, if I got invited over to a friend's house when I was little to play Pilgrim's Progress, I would think very poorly of that. Today, your charity, tomorrow, your selflessness. What about like swords and like Harry Potter and dragons and stuff?
33:04 Dominic Sandbrook? When I went to friends' houses when I was maybe eight, there was a lot of throwing stuff.
33:08 Speaker 03 Did you play Little Women? Surely you did. You'd host little tea parties and wear little aprons and...
33:13 Dominic Sandbrook? No, absolutely not. The single worst thing that ever happened actually was generally when people came to my house and then I took the opportunity to behave incredibly badly. So I remember one time, I can't believe I'm just telling this story, it's absolutely insane. I remember one time my friend and I decided that we would get loads of mud and smear it over my parents' car so that we could then slide down off the roof along the windscreen.
33:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's classic stuff.
33:36 Dominic Sandbrook? And use it as a slide. And I can, I cannot describe how cross my parents were. They were unbelievably cross.
33:43 Speaker 03 Big improvement, though, on Pilgrim's Progress.
33:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, there must be some lesson here. I don't know. This is what's made me the person I am precisely because I wasn't having these, this improving kind of parental education. I think, anyway, there's Pilgrim's Progress, there's the domestic novels of the mid 19th century. So these are-
34:01 Speaker 03 They're very sentimental. It's all about women, sisterly affection. They're very warm. So Elaine Sherwalter, who wrote the introduction to the version of Little Women that I was reading, she says that they emphasise images of an Edenic women's culture. And Nathaniel Hawthorne, so the famous writer of the Scarlet Letter, was very, very rude about these. And he called the women who wrote them the scribbling women, which is very patronising.
34:24 Dominic Sandbrook? It is patronising.
34:25 Speaker 03 And because these domestic novels, they kind of encapsulate the conflict that these up and coming kind of female writers face between their artistic ambitions, their private feminine roles. And so they never considered them to be kind of great arts of literature. They didn't see themselves as numbered among the ranks of the great male writers of the day. And so they always justified what was, you know, on the whole considered to be pretty middling artistically, as, you know, they were born of a financial need. And this is what Jo later does with the sensation novels that she writes, or stories that she writes.
34:58 Dominic Sandbrook? She's writing to help her family. That's what she says, isn't it?
35:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:01 Dominic Sandbrook? One other influence, actually Dickens. So Dickens runs through this and they found their own version of the Pickwick Club, don't they? Which is the club that they allow Laurie as the sort of, he's the sort of honorary girl. Oh, it's a sweet scene. And actually, in the film, it's very sweet when Timothy Chalamet bursts out from behind those clothes.
35:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, they vote him in. Yeah.
35:17 Dominic Sandbrook? They vote him into the club.
35:18 Speaker 03 And Alcott loved Dickens, so that explains that.
35:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Although, a big difference between Alcott and Dickens, Dickens's style, of course, is very florid and very ornate. Alcott's style is very, very direct and simple, isn't it? It's quite unadorned. There's not much metaphor. The very first edition was very, very American and very New England. It had lots of sort of New England slang and New England idioms and stuff like that.
35:41 Speaker 03 We spoke last week about how P G Wodehouse loved slang. Louisa May Alcott loved American idioms. And you can see that in kind of her own diary entries, her own journals. And in the way that Jo speaks, part of the way that she makes Jo more masculine is that she, she's constantly using slang and idioms and, and, and her sisters were always telling her off for this. I like that. I think that's a good detail.
36:04 Dominic Sandbrook? What's interesting about this is that this is a point in American literary history, influenced by writers like Ralph Wood or Emerson. Writers are trying to break away from European and particularly English models and to find their own distinctly kind of American voice. And actually, there's a scene in the book where a load of English people turn up and they play croquet. And the English cheat, it's unbelievable that Louise May, she's massively let herself down with this.
36:28 Speaker 03 She has. And she also on a trip to England, she wrote back and said everything was very slow and boring and sedate and very un Yankee, which I take as a compliment.
36:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, quite rightly. The big thing, of course, about the style is that it is so moralistic. Both Marmee and the narrator, they write constantly with a kind of moralizing hat on, don't they?
36:49 Speaker 03 And the fact that the narrator, she intervenes sometimes, she'll say to you, like, oh, I'm telling you a tale of this lovely family. It's a little bit like how in the rhyme of the ancient mariner, the mariner has a point that he's trying to make. You know, he's trying to say like it's a warning. Sometimes the intervention of the narrator in this is like, just to remind you, this is a moral tale and I'm teaching you lessons as we go through this lovely little family. And that element of it is really what ruins it for me. The relentless moralizing, like Marmee especially, you know, saying things like, our road is before us and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace, which is a true celestial city.
37:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh.
37:27 Speaker 03 There's a lot of telling, you know, she doesn't really let you find out what people are like or what, you know, by, by kind of implying or showing. She actively tells you what the sisters are like right from the get go and then feeds into those stereotypes for the rest of the book along their journey to kind of moral enlightenment.
37:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Let's talk about the sisters. So you've got Mr. And Mrs. March, they're very, they're basically very boring. Mr. March is off stage. We don't really find out that much about him. He barely appears in the book at all. Mrs. March is saintly, kind. At one point, she says that she used to have a bad temper, but that she has conquered it through her tremendous use of the pilgrim's progress kind of inspiration.
38:08 Speaker 03 The one interesting thing about that is, is that people said that Louise May Alcott's mother, Abba, had a very bad temper. And that's who Louisa inherited it from. So that's obviously drawn from her own life.
38:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And so the sisters, take us through the sisters, Tabby.
38:21 Speaker 03 So these are based on Louise May Alcott's own sisters and, you know, this sisterhood, this kind of little female paradise is very much the heart of the book. And this is also what makes it kind of YA, is it puts the reader in the minds of of these young women and their struggles and stuff. It doesn't talk down to the young readers, female readers who who are reading it. So it's something very new in this way. And Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, was a massive fan of it for this reason, because she said that she saw a glimpse of her future self in Jo.
38:50 Dominic Sandbrook? So interesting, isn't it? Because I think if you're a young woman reading this book, or well, probably a teenager, I suppose, you can find one, you certainly find aspects of yourself in one of the sisters, surely.
39:00 Speaker 03 Definitely. This is the thing. There are four different facets of femininity. I would say specifically 19th century femininity. But there are also elements of it that I think anyone of any age can kind of relate to about growing up.
39:13 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm curious about which one you empathise with most. I have my own views about.
39:17 Speaker 03 Oh, I'm frightened about the answer to this, actually. I had a really long, dark night of the soul. But anyway, we'll we'll get there. But let's start with kind of the least significant sister. And this is Beth or Elizabeth. So she is rosy, smooth haired, bright eyed. She's 13. She's very shy. She's timid. And she has a peaceful expression. And she's based on Louise May Alcott's sister, Lizzie, who died when she was 22. And she is arguably not particularly interesting, I would say. She's just very sweet. She's very kind. She loves music. She, you know, has, she's, she's never wanted to get in people's way or anything like that. And the most significant thing about her, really, there are two things, is that she is a way of showing whether or not other characters are kind, and whether or not they pay her attention and are good to her. And also her
40:02 Speaker 03 death, which is a massive turning point in Jo's life and Jo's development.
40:07 Dominic Sandbrook? She's a saint, isn't she?
40:08 Speaker 03 She's basically a saint. But her death is slow and sweet and sad.
40:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
40:12 Speaker 03 And then we get to Meg. And Meg is the pretty one. She's the most feminine one. She's based on Louise May Alcott's sister, Anna, who was an inspiring actress, hence why Meg loves to act in the book. And she's kind of the most. Sort of stereotypical woman of the bunch. She's dutiful, she's feminine, she likes society, she loves pretty things.
40:32 Dominic Sandbrook? She wants to be a lady, doesn't she?
40:34 Speaker 03 She wants to be a lady. She overcomes this by marrying a poor man, but she does get married, you know, young. And the rest of the book, the second half of the book is basically about her domestic travails as she learns to become the perfect wife and mother.
40:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, she wants to be a good wife and mother. So that's Meg. Then there's Amy. So Amy, Florence Pugh in the film. She actually in reality doesn't look anything like Florence Pugh. She is sort of slender and pale and a little bit ethereal.
41:00 Speaker 03 She's angelic looking.
41:01 Dominic Sandbrook? But Amy is fun, isn't she? She's a little bit, as a child, she's a bit spoiled, she's a bit selfish, she's a bit of a little brat. But she's, she's a laugh.
41:11 Speaker 03 She thinks she's the most important kind of person in every room, but you're right. For me, she's the most kind of realistic of the sisters because she's many things at one go. If you were to say, this is a certain type of woman, this is a certain type of woman, Amy is less easy perhaps to pigeonhole. You know, the most, the single most confusing thing about this whole book for me, when, I felt, and I read it the first time when I was 11 and this time as well, I had to look it up. Was the incident with the limes, because this is where Amy is desperate to collect limes at school because it's a, like a sign of popularity. I didn't know what limes were and then I looked it up. These are literally pickled limes that they keep in their desks. Who takes pickled limes to school?
41:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Reading your description of Amy, you clearly see her as yourself, don't you?
41:50 Speaker 03 Amy's fantastic.
41:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, you're not even denying it. You're not even denying it.
41:54 Speaker 03 Amy gets the guy as well, as we'll see. But anyway, let's get to Jo.
41:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Jo is that heart. She is the absolute central character.
42:00 Speaker 03 She's a tomboy.
42:01 Dominic Sandbrook? She's clever, she's angular, she's described as being like a cult because she doesn't know what to do with her long limbs. I mean, that's interesting because that's must be one of the first times in literature that people have used that expression that people always use about teen, about young teenagers. Cult-like. They don't know what to do with their body, which is absolutely true. It's what 14, 15 year olds are like.
42:24 Speaker 03 But more 14, 15 year old boys, I think.
42:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, and she's often described in quite a boyish way. She is just, you know, her eyes, we're told are fierce and funny and thoughtful. She is. Hot tempered, she is clumsy, she's very unladylike, she's not interested in being a lady or in kind of womanly things.
42:46 Speaker 03 She likes boy slang.
42:47 Dominic Sandbrook? At one point, she cuts all her hair, so she has a kind of boyish crop.
42:52 Speaker 03 You see strains of the woman that Joe will ultimately become because she does end up being very much a woman and not the soul of a boy trapped in the body of a woman. At one point, she says, which Louisa May Alcott actually said as well, that she felt that she had been born a woman, but she should have been a boy. But she has vanities and after Joe cuts all of her hair off, she kind of cries herself to sleep.
43:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
43:13 Speaker 03 So she's a woman of contradictions, like Louisa May Alcott, I would say.
43:16 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, you said you thought Amy was the most realised character. I think Joe is a pretty well realised character. I think she's a complicated person who is torn in different ways. You know, she's not a caricature, she's not simple, she wants to be different things. She wants to be a tomboy, but also she doesn't want to be a woman, I think.
43:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, the most relatable, I think, actually strikingly modern passages of this book are the bits when Joe is struggling with who she is as she's growing up and she's battling grief. So yeah, I think that's a fair point.
43:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Again, a very early example, perhaps the earliest in fiction, of the idea that a teenager has to work out who they are.
43:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's very true.
43:52 Dominic Sandbrook? That that's not preordained, that they have to fight, you know, which we're all so familiar with, having been teenagers, who you, what are you, how are you going to dress, who are you going to be, who are you going to hang around with, what's your niche in the world? You know, Joe is wrestling with this in a way that the others perhaps aren't.
44:06 Speaker 03 So it's a new kind of kind of buildings Roman this, the fact that it's a coming of age story, but it's addressing a different phase of life to most coming of age stories. But then the other character who she's very, very close to is Laurie. And Laurie also is someone that struggles with himself. He struggles with the fact that his personal ambitions to be a great musician contradicts what he ought to be as a good Victorian man, you know, stepping into his grandfather's footsteps, taking on the family business, the fact he has lots of money, he's very lazy, but he adores Joe. And I think that they have a lovely relationship because he likes Joe for just who she is, this kind of tomboyish, clumsy girl. And Joe loves Laurie because as a good friend, but also because she
44:46 Speaker 03 Kind of wants him to be more than he, you know, might be, given that he's so lazy and has a weakness for kind of pleasure.
44:52 Dominic Sandbrook? They're great companions, they're great comrades, they tease each other, they unusually in this book, which is otherwise very, as you said, very wholesome. They do have kind of great banter.
45:02 Speaker 03 They have great banter, yeah.
45:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the expectation you have as a reader, when you're about a third of the way through, is quite clearly they're going to end up together. Because they are so well suited.
45:13 Speaker 03 There's something in this as well, because I think that it's almost as though Joe and Laurie at certain points, it's like they swap genders. So they both give up their full masculine feminine name, for instance.
45:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh yeah, they do, yeah.
45:23 Speaker 03 He's very sensitive and sensual, Laurie, and in the original edition, he was very feminine physically, had these big dark eyes, he was very slender, had thinner hands. And he was shorter than Joe. And then they, the editors came in and they said, no, he has to be taller than Joe and he has to be more American.
45:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Increase the size of his hands.
45:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, they have to have bigger hands. But then we're constantly told that he and Joe kind of wouldn't be a good match. Because they're both too fiery and they're both too passionate. So whether or not they end up together is kind of, when you go from, from book one to book two, that's the thing that I was wondering more than anything else. And I was hoping, hoping that they would, but whether they do or do not, I guess we'll have to find out after the break.
46:07 Speaker 05 We are getting a statement from number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.
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47:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Welcome back everybody to the book club. So we were talking about the romance between Laurie and Joe. Amy, what do you make of the romance between Laurie?
47:59 Speaker 03 You're saying that like it's like an indictment on my character, but it's a great thing. Amy's like the most interesting character in the book and she has great taste in clothes.
48:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Superficial.
48:07 Speaker 03 And she gets the guy. And why does she get the guy? Because when Laurie proposes to Joe in a scene that I actually find quite moving, Joe turns him down. And this is partly because she fears losing her independence. She sees him as a brother, but I'm just going to read a little bit of this section out because it is genuinely quite heartbreaking.
48:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Are you doing both voices?
48:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, I am.
48:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Go on then, go for it.
48:30 Speaker 03 "No Teddy, please don't. I will and you must hear me. It's no use, Joe. We've got to have it out and the sooner the better for both of us. I've loved you ever since I've known you, Joe. Couldn't help it. You've been so good to me. I've tried to show it, but you wouldn't let me. Now I'm going to make you hear and give me an answer, for I can't go on so any longer. I wanted to save you this. I thought you'd understand", began Joe, finding it a great deal harder than she expected. "Oh Teddy, I'm so sorry, so desperately sorry. I could kill myself if it would do any good. You know it's impossible for people to make themselves love other people if they don't", cried Joe, inelegantly but remorsefully, as she softly patted his shoulder. They do sometimes, said a muffled voice from the post. I don't believe it's the right
49:11 Speaker 03 sort of love and I'd rather not try it, was the decided answer. See, I think that's very modern, like that that really captures that experience for anyone who's gone through it on either side, I think.
49:21 Dominic Sandbrook? First things says you bottle the accents, which is sad.
49:23 Speaker 03 No, I thought that, you know, when I do the accents.
49:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it becomes too comical.
49:28 Speaker 03 You know, a comedic edge, whereas I really wanted to capture the poignancy there of what is quite a heartbreaking scene. And the reason Jo does that turns down Laurie, I mean, it's A, she doesn't love him the right way, as she says, but also because at this stage in her life, when she's still kind of a teenager, she fears that he, by marrying a wealthy man, it'll deprive her of her ambition to be independent and make her own money and become a writer. Because above all, you know, Jo is ambitious and she she wants to be independent. And this brings us to quite a big kind of question at the heart of the book, which is, can female ambition live alongside femininity during this period?
50:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, okay, let's just hold Laurie and Jo for a second. I think we should come back to this later on, because I think they should have ended up together, frankly.
50:15 Speaker 03 I totally agree.
50:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, on the issue of the female ambition, which is the sort of, which is part of the reason she turns him down, is that she wants to be her own person. And she thinks that, at this point, she thinks that getting married and settling down will deprive her of that freedom. I mean, obviously, one of the key themes of the book is, what do you do if you're a young woman? And how do you find fulfillment in a society that has very, very rigid expectations for women? And to some degree, the story of the book is how they go from being daughters into wives, and presumably mothers, and mothers, actually. And you could argue, I suppose, that part of the book is them struggling with the idea that they're going to have to define themselves in relation to a man?
51:01 Dominic Sandbrook? But they also want to define themselves in relation to each other, other women, and just in and of themselves, don't they?
51:07 Speaker 03 And it's interesting, just very quickly, because from the beginning of part two onwards, there are suddenly so many more male characters in the story. And that is the moment in the book when they start becoming women. And therefore, they have to define themselves in relation to a man in this kind of a world. And I guess Jo grapples with that. She's trying to work out, can she not, maybe? Can she be a spinster?
51:29 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, you could argue that one of the sad things about the book, one of the sad chapters, in retrospect, maybe not at the time, I mean, it seems very moralistic, is there's a chapter called Castles in the Air, isn't there? Which is a key chapter, because this is when the children, as they then really are, are talking about their dreams. So, for example, Amy wants to be an artist, or Jo wants to be a writer.
51:52 Speaker 03 They both want to be great, though. That's the really kind of crucial thing. They both say kind of great or nothing. I want to be remembered, I want to be important.
52:01 Dominic Sandbrook? So, to go through the ambitions of the children, Beth, the one who dies, the saintly victim, she doesn't really have any ambition, does she, other than to leave the house? And that's in a way why Louisa May Alcott has to curtail her story, why she has to cut her off, because there's nowhere for Beth to go as a character. She's defined entirely by being the saintly victim sitting by the hearth. And, you know, what would you do with her? She has to go, basically. That's the fate that's preordained for her, don't you think?
52:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, and also, there's one point where Jo thinks that Beth seems so low in spirits because she's in love with Laurie, and she knows deep down that Laurie loves her, Jo. And so she leaves. But actually, Beth never has enough passion in her to be in love with anyone. She doesn't have enough passion to want to go out into the world. And quite touchingly, actually, she sort of knows that about herself. But in that way, she's like a saintly, idealised version of the perfect Victorian woman.
52:55 Dominic Sandbrook? She's a Dickensian woman, that's what she is.
52:57 Speaker 03 She totally is. She's quite Laura Fairley from The Woman in White.
53:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Then there's Meg. Meg also is slightly disappointing, isn't she? She's very conventional. We said she wants to be a lady. You're very rude about her husband, John Brook. You call him the most boring man in America in your notes.
53:15 Speaker 03 He's a nice man. It's just that those passages I found a little bit dull. It's just like long sections about Meg grappling with sewing and buttons and housework. There is actually one quite touching bit, though, in those that I thought about, which is that there's a bit when shocked by the fact the marriage isn't perfect, the minute that she gets married and that these cold silences emerge between her and her husband and she kind of sits there and she watches him and they're talking about very dull, awkward things and then she decides to cross the room and speak to him and break the ice kind of thing.
53:46 Dominic Sandbrook? I think, again, that's quite well observed.
53:48 Speaker 03 It's really well observed. For anyone who's in a relationship, that's very well observed.
53:52 Dominic Sandbrook? You're betraying too much, Tabby.
53:54 Speaker 03 I really am.
53:54 Dominic Sandbrook? I think.
53:55 Speaker 03 I never break.
53:58 Dominic Sandbrook? I think there is, I think that's one of, again, one of the, maybe the first times in literature where somebody is acknowledging that actually, once you get married, the story doesn't stop. And particularly in this case, a big issue for Meg is that she's had children and her husband is going off and leaving her with the kids. She's putting all her time into the kids. And she goes to seek her mother's advice and her mother says, well, you know, basically you need to have more date nights with your husband.
54:23 Speaker 03 You're neglecting him. Yeah.
54:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, you need to spend, and of course, it's all, this is the way these things work. It's all the woman's fault and she needs to make more effort into, you know, prettifying herself for her husband or whatever.
54:34 Speaker 03 And when she buys a dress, I mean, it's like, oh, oh my God. And true, they don't have much money, but I think that her husband at that point, rather than saying, you know, having a sort of tight clenched mouth and looking like someone's died, I think he should have been like, you know what, Meg? You deserve a nice dress.
54:49 Dominic Sandbrook? He's quite condescending, isn't he, John Brook? Whenever she's trying to please him or something, he'll always say, he sat her on his knee and he said, oh, well done, little lady.
54:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. And he goes through her account books as though it's like, it's like cosplay accounting. Show me your little purse. What have you got today? Yeah. Anyway. So then we get to Amy.
55:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. You're not going to invite them to one of your dinner parties, are you?
55:11 Speaker 03 No, I don't think so. I'd invite Amy to my dinner parties.
55:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Would you?
55:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:17 Dominic Sandbrook? You love Amy. You absolutely love Amy.
55:19 Speaker 03 Okay, so Amy's great ambition at this point is to become a successful artist. And she says, I want to be great or nothing. But the more that she goes out into the world, and she does, unlike the other sisters, she really does go out into the world. She travels, she goes around Europe. The more time that she spends in society, the more ladylike she becomes, the more that she feels her art is inferior. And particularly, which is very self-knowing, when she looks upon the work of kind of the great European masters, especially Michelangelo, she realizes that she's not good enough to be great. And so she says, well, in order to make my way in the world, I will marry a wealthy man.
55:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
55:51 Speaker 03 And the implication there could be interpreted as, oh, genius requires that, you know, female artists have to sacrifice their femininity in order to be great. They have to be masculine to be geniuses or nothing. I don't think that's entirely true. I think that's quite self-knowing from Amy. You know, have you ever had that where you think, like, I remember, I sort of remember thinking like, oh, what's the point in playing like sport every day? If I'm never, I'm never going to be good. I'm never going to be amazing. I'm never going to be like.
56:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Tabby, that's not the point of playing sport. I can't believe you've completely missed the point of sport.
56:21 Speaker 03 No, but I get what she means. Do you ever get that thing where you're like, well, if I'm not going to be the best, like, why bother? So she, she, she cards out a new path for herself. She thinks I'm going to marry myself a wealthy husband.
56:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Jo, her dream is to be a great writer. And actually, she slightly pulls away from that, doesn't she, in the book? She doesn't really become a great writer, which is sad. And actually, that's true. I mean, all the girls have to compromise on their dreams. They are fiery, passionate, interesting people. And they're perhaps all a bit more boring by the end of the book, would you say? Do you think that's true?
56:53 Speaker 03 I think so, because the thing that's kind of hammered home the whole way through is those traits of theirs presented in the book as their moral failings, whether they are, they have bad tempers, or they're competitive, or, you know, they're passionate about something. They're constantly encouraged to suppress those and be better people for it. And it makes them less interesting. And it is true that all of their castles in the air that they speak about, none of them ever live out those dreams, but they do live out different versions of those. But another thing that Jo massively compromises on. Is the writing itself and a huge tension at the heart of her story is whether or not she can be a great artist, a great writer, but also make money for her family. And this is something that Louise May Alcott struggled with her whole life as well. She was always
57:36 Speaker 03 torn between wanting to make money for her family and provide for them and write works of real literary merit. And I think on the whole for her, economic stimulus was probably greater. So in her teens, she wrote, I will do something by and by, don't care what, teach, so act, write, anything to help the family and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die.
57:55 Dominic Sandbrook? I think this is quite well observed. I think people, I think the idea that most people, when they're in any walk of life, that they're only, you know, you can divide them into the sheep and the goats, people who are only doing it for the money and people are only doing it for artistic expression. But that's obviously massively simplistic. Most people are wrestling with multiple different motivations.
58:17 Speaker 03 Definitely.
58:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And they are, you know, it's a compromise between those two things. And Jo actually does find something she's good at, she likes doing and pays well, which is this sensation fiction. So we talked about this in The Warm and White. Sensation fiction massively takes off in the 1850s and 1860s in Britain and then in America. It's seen as, I mean, you describe it in the notes as the romanticy of the day. You're just, you're softening people up for their, people's identities being stolen, it's kidnapping, bigamous marriages, conspiracies, all of this sort of thing, very exciting, very glamorous, extremely popular. And Jo in the book, as Louise May Alcott in real life, loves doing it and is
59:03 Dominic Sandbrook? really good at it. And then she meets the worst person in the world, Professor Friedrich Behr, this incredibly-
59:10 Speaker 03 You hate him.
59:12 Dominic Sandbrook? I do. I think he's awful. I think he's awful. And in the film, the Greta Gerwig film, I mean, you and Alia, our producer.
59:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, we were swooning.
59:21 Dominic Sandbrook? You were absolutely swooning. You were shaming yourselves before the recording, getting so excited about the bloke who plays Friedrich Behr.
59:27 Speaker 03 Now, he really is my type, the guy in the film, not in the book. Yeah.
59:31 Dominic Sandbrook? But- In the book, he's like about 80 years older than Jo.
59:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:37 Dominic Sandbrook? He's physically very unprepossessing and he's, and worst of all, he's a massive bore.
59:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, he reminds me of Dracula from the Bram Stoker book.
59:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Dracula is much more interesting. Dracula would love, Dracula would love a sensation novel.
59:50 Speaker 03 I mean, he's kind, that's hammered home, but he basically says to Jo, Jo feels really ashamed about writing these sensation novels as it is. And then Friedrich works out, you know, that Jo's writing these and he says to her, you know, do the right thing and, and, and write from the heart. So he says, you should be writing from life, from the depths of your soul. There is nothing in here of the woman that I am privileged to know, i.e. don't write from your imagination. Write only what you know to be true from your real life. It's realism or nothing.
1:00:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Tabby, imagine you went on a date with a bloke and he found out what you were doing and he said in his German accent, oh, Tabby, you are much better than this. You are letting yourself down. You're not, this is not good.
1:00:27 Speaker 03 No second date for sure.
1:00:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Definitely not. So condescending to her.
1:00:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:31 Dominic Sandbrook? To say this is beneath you and all of this sort of thing.
1:00:34 Speaker 03 But it works because Jo does stop writing for a while. And the interesting thing is that Louise May Alcott said of Little Women, once it was published, it's not a bit sensational, but simple and true. We really lived most of it, as if she thinks that, you know, this is the proper thing that she ought to be doing. Even though she said, my natural inclination is for the lurid style. And even after Little Women was published, you know, money did continue to be a massive incentive for her. She said, I do not like writing moral tales for the young. I do it because it pays well, as though.
1:01:03 Dominic Sandbrook? But isn't that the fantastic irony that she's writing moralistic stories about, you know, money's not the be all and end all in life. You know, kindness is all. She's writing them against her better judgment for money.
1:01:17 Speaker 03 But this is the thing. I feel like in writing Little Women, the fact that she didn't really want to write it, the fact it doesn't really reflect her much of what she thought about. Life and marriage and, and a woman's role. I feel like it's a book that's so full of contradictions and the real weaknesses of it. And the stuff that she was almost forced to do against her will. And this is the kind of the sentimentality of it, the piet of it. And this is a big question, I think, you know, that. People, it's a criticism that people often fling at little women, those that, you know, don't love it because it is beloved. Is that is little women just a code forced term for sentimentality and female piety? And I think that the gender of the reader has traditionally had a lot to do with your interpretation of that.
1:01:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Male critics and male readers have historically been very down on little women.
1:02:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:02:02 Dominic Sandbrook? They have not been interested in it. You mentioned Elaine Shawalter's essay about it. I mean, she says in that essay, this is a book that was colossally influential on the American imagination. You know, from the point of its publication in the mid to late 19th century, all the way through probably to the middle of the 20th century, but only on half of the American population. And the other half just laughed at it and sneered at it or were totally indifferent to it.
1:02:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:02:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And yet, do you know what? I actually quite like the sentimentality. I do like that. And I think we are primed as 21st century readers to laugh at that and to ironize it and to undermine it and to scoff, to inhabit the worlds of those first readers. They would have read the stuff like When Beth Dies, When the Father Returns and
1:02:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's lovely.
1:02:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Here's another Christmas present for the March family. Or I know you'll laugh at me about this, Tabby, because you already did when we discussed this, the bit where Laurie and Amy find they get together and he proposes on the rowing boat. I find all that quite, quite moving.
1:03:05 Speaker 03 In a way, we're belying the traditional kind of roles, expectations of male and female really here because I, I think there are parts of it that are so well wrought and so insightful and they really do appeal to me because I can relate to them as someone that's gone from girlhood to womanhood. And she really gets that, you know, be that Meg's relationship and the advice that her mother gives her in order to overcome her own pride, whether that's the fact that, you know, Joe is lonely and she says at one point, you know, your love used to be enough, but it's not anymore. Or Laurie's proposal, all these things. There are parts of it that I'm like, God, that is so apt. That's so true. But then, and I do actually like the domesticity of it as well. I like the kind of female community they build for themselves there.
1:03:48 Speaker 03 But the way that the character is just so irritatingly obsessed with their morality all All the time and it constantly comes back and they're intent on self sacrifice and perfection. And I think that the moral growth of the sisters throughout the book, I think that's unrealistic. I don't think people do just manage to overcome their flaws like that. I think it's a constant back and forth all your life.
1:04:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:04:09 Speaker 03 I think that's a slightly like mythologized version of female piety that slightly irritates me. And the way that these moral lessons are woven into so many scenes is a massive buzzkill.
1:04:19 Dominic Sandbrook? You don't like the bit when they're playing a game, they're outside, they're having a great laugh in the countryside. They're saying, isn't it lovely countryside, lovely.
1:04:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, lovely day, sun shining, we're having a great time.
1:04:28 Dominic Sandbrook? There's a lovelier country even than that, where we shall go by and by when we're good enough. See, you don't like that. And actually, because I'm a massive fun sponge, I quite like that. I thought that was quite sweet.
1:04:41 Speaker 03 But there's a massive exception to the sentiment, like to my slight begrudgment of the sentimentality, and that is Beth's death. I think this is genuinely so moving. Beth's growing knowledge of it, her steady acceptance of it, her self-knowledge. She's far more docile than her, than her sisters. And, and the way that she describes that, it's so tender. And then Jo's grief as well, I think that could only have been written by a woman who had lost her sister, as Louisa May Elcourt had, in losing her sister Lizzie. I mean, I could have wept reading those passages. And the way that Jo struggles with herself after Beth's death, you know, wanting to be good, but not able to overcome this pain inside her.
1:05:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, you made the point, didn't you, that there's a sort of tension at the heart of Little Women between the, I, I mean, I think there is a tension between the very acute, as it were, realistic observation of the contradictions of human emotion and the way that we respond to things on the one hand. And then the other hand is the fact that her publisher and her dad and her training is pushing her to make it a moralizing, sort of very homespun, wholesome tale of these paragons of virtue. There's a constant tension, never resolved, all through the book, between the realism and then the sort of the, the Christian vision, I suppose.
1:06:02 Dominic Sandbrook? That's an instability that actually I think is quite, quite fun and makes it quite interesting. Because even the marriages, you know, Beth obviously marries, sorry, Beth doesn't marry anybody. She marries God.
1:06:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:06:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Meg marries Mr. Boring, John Brook, Laurie's tutor. I mean, who cares about that? That's the most boring marriage in history. And you wouldn't have them to a dinner party because they're just so pious and.
1:06:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, there'd be a lot of deer, wouldn't there?
1:06:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. Well done, little girl. You know, that kind of thing. Now Amy's marriage. So I already gave it away in a, you know, I let myself down and I told everybody that Amy marries Laurie.
1:06:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, you love this.
1:06:41 Dominic Sandbrook? I think they'd be a nice couple. I think, I like, I think it's quite sweet how they get together and him proposing in the rowing boat and stuff. I do think he's married the wrong sister. No question about that.
1:06:50 Speaker 03 We all know this to be true. I don't really like it. I, in fact, this was a bit of the part of the book I absolutely hated. And when I used to watch the Winona Ryder movie, I would stop before Christian Bale got together with Amy.
1:07:02 Dominic Sandbrook? You would stop?
1:07:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, stop watching.
1:07:04 Dominic Sandbrook? That's, wait, you'd re-watch the film, but only up to that point?
1:07:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:07:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, that's ridiculous. That's absolutely ridiculous, baby.
1:07:11 Speaker 03 Well, it's, it's my reality. It would, it happens too quickly. They fall in love in like five minutes. And over the course of those five minutes, Laurie is constantly thinking, thinking to himself, well, if I can't have the sister that I love, I'll take the, you know, the second best one.
1:07:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:07:25 Speaker 03 But I suppose it's presented as a happy marriage because, you know, Amy is a better person by this point. She's less selfish. Yes, she's given up her ambitions, but she's chosen love over money, although it's helpful that it comes with a big dollop of money as well.
1:07:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:07:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, and.
1:07:39 Dominic Sandbrook? They're both a laugh, aren't they? They'd have fun.
1:07:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're both, they're both a laugh.
1:07:43 Dominic Sandbrook? You would have them over.
1:07:44 Speaker 03 But Joe and Laurie would have been a better couple. I think what she should have done is, is that she should have let Joe have her kind of come to God moment where she realises that. Because Joe has a, not, Joe does not have the ending that you would expect of her. Because throughout the book, she is protesting her independence. She's saying, I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe. She's saying she doesn't want to get married, she wants to walk a different path. And then after Beth's death and watching Meg get married and all of this, she realises that she is lonely and and that she wants a different kind of love. She wants to try all sorts of love.
1:08:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:08:18 Speaker 03 And I think this is probably the moment where she should be like, well, actually, all this time, you know, Laurie's been there and he's made for me. But instead, she realises that she's in love with Count Dracula. She realises that she's in love with Professor Bear, the the German professor who she'd met while living in New York. And it's really interesting because she ends up, you know, marrying him quite sweetly, actually. You know, there's quite relatable moments, like when she thinks that he's gone and left her and ditched her. And she's like, well, I never cared about him anyway, but secretly pining. And and she becomes quite self-conscious and she starts caring about her bonnet and stuff. But it's interesting because Jo's always been this really independent character. And yet the presentation of spinsterhood, which, you know, Louisa May Alcott was a spinster, is a very negative one.
1:09:03 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. And also, it's a shame that Jo marries somebody who is so dominant, who is much older than her, more worldly, more well travelled. Fatherly, he's much more intellectual, he's a professor even, you know, he's got a title that she cannot possibly aspire to have.
1:09:18 Speaker 03 She gives up writing the books that she loved, the stories that she loves to write because he tells her they're not good enough.
1:09:24 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it's very hard to read this and to, and I know that lots of different feminist critics have different views about this. Some see him as an authority figure who is smothering her. Others say, no, no, no, no, no. He's a person who is allowing her to be herself or whatever. I think he is massively smothering her. And I think this is not the true ending that Louisa May Alcott. I don't believe it's the ending that she deep down believed in or wanted. I think either, as you say, Jo just goes her own way. I mean, that's the truest, I think. The thing that readers wanted at the time was there not an expectation that Jo would marry Laurie, but she didn't want to do that.
1:10:04 Speaker 03 So she said, I will not marry Jo to Laurie because it's too neat, it's too tidy. I won't give Jo, you know, such a traditional ending. But then she had all these letters from young women saying, please marry off Jo to someone, please can Jo have a nice, happily married ending? And she had pressure from her publishers and she actually wrote to a friend of hers, you know, I shouldn't, Jo should have ended up a spinster. But after all the pressure, I thought I'd give her an ending. So I thought I put her with an odd fellow at least, you know, someone who's a bit.
1:10:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
1:10:31 Speaker 03 Quirky.
1:10:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And lots of critics now, 20th century and 21st century critics, sort of feminist critics or whatever, have seen this as a betrayal, as a betrayal of Jo and of the possibilities of the character. I suppose the counter argument would be, Jo does end up being fulfilled by this marriage because she opens a school. Her husband, perhaps because he's European or whatever, he does take her seriously as an intellectual.
1:10:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:10:56 Dominic Sandbrook? As a person in her own right.
1:10:58 Speaker 03 He's not a traditionally masculine American man.
1:11:02 Dominic Sandbrook? No.
1:11:02 Speaker 03 Theirs is a very egalitarian marriage as well, because Jo says to him, look, I'll only marry you if you let me earn our bread as well alongside you.
1:11:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm.
1:11:09 Speaker 03 She says, I'm to carry my share, Friedrich, and help to earn the home. Make your mind up to that, or I'll never go. And he says, yeah, perfect, fine by me. So they are equals in that sense.
1:11:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And I suppose what you would say, one would also say to the critics is, Louisa May Alcott is never going to give this book the ending that you would want as a critic writing in the 1970s or today or whatever. I mean, she's a Victorian, writing for a Victorian audience. So it's unrealistic, I suppose, to expect Jo to be empowered in a sort of modern feminist way. But I do think, I do, I mean, I just hate Professor Bear.
1:11:43 Speaker 03 She should have ended up with Laurie. I would have been very happy with that because Laurie loves that, Jo's wildness and her boyishness. And he loved her for who she was.
1:11:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, lovely. There's a claim in the book, isn't there, that basically they can't go be together because they're both passionate people?
1:11:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a terrible excuse.
1:11:59 Dominic Sandbrook? That is a bad excuse. I mean, a passionate person generally doesn't want to marry somebody who's passionless.
1:12:03 Speaker 03 No way. Yeah, you want, you want shared passion, shared interest, all that.
1:12:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Thanks.
1:12:09 Speaker 03 That's my advice.
1:12:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Great marital advice there from Savvy. Brilliant.
1:12:13 Speaker 03 But speaking of marriage, what became of Louisa May Alcott? Did she herself, the happy ending that she wrote for her characters?
1:12:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, she never did marry, did she?
1:12:21 Speaker 03 No.
1:12:21 Dominic Sandbrook? She feels an anomalous person, doesn't she? She says, I am more than half persuaded I'm a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body because I've fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never in the least with any man. So a lot of modern critics say, oh, is this basically, is she basically, was she a lesbian or whatever? And is that what explains why she stayed on her own all these years? I mean, she also stayed on her own, didn't she? Because she felt an obligation to her family. She's clearly been crushed to some degree by her father. I mean, this is massive amateur psychologising by me.
1:12:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:12:57 Dominic Sandbrook? But she's in his shadow and.
1:13:00 Speaker 03 She supported her sisters.
1:13:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:13:02 Speaker 03 I mean, also, I mean, you know, there are so many what ifs here. Is she deep down pining for the sort of ending that Joe got in the end? Does she feel that the kind of the marriages on offer in that time, kind of traditional sort of 19th century marriages are not enough to fill her? Who knows? We'll never know the answer to any of these questions. But you, I think that it is pop psychology, but there's got to be something in that she was so bound to her family. She was very bound to her mother. She nursed her to the very end. She took care of her sisters. She took care of her father. And apart from a European tour in 1870 and a couple of trips to New York. She spent the last 20 years of her life just living in Boston and Concord, you know, nursing her mother. She actually adopted her sister May's little daughter.
1:13:44 Speaker 03 May died giving birth to her in Europe and she kind of took her on as her own alongside her sister Anna. Yeah. And then her mother died in 1877. And then Louise's own health, which had been bad ever since she had that nursing stint. She died in Boston on March 6th, 1888, two days after her father's death. She wrote, I've had a lot of troubles, so I write jolly tales, which is kind of sad.
1:14:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, that is sad. Well, it is a jolly tale in some ways. We didn't really leave ourselves much time to talk about the film. I thought the film was quite clever and I thought some of the casting was wrong.
1:14:16 Speaker 03 Did you?
1:14:17 Dominic Sandbrook? I did. I like Saoirse Ronan. I think she's brilliant, by the way.
1:14:20 Speaker 03 She's superb.
1:14:21 Dominic Sandbrook? I think she's brilliant. And she is quite, I mean, she doesn't look like the Joe of my imagination, but I think she plays the part superbly. I actually think Florence Pugh plays the part of Amy extremely well.
1:14:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:14:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And she's incredibly watchable and she's a very, very good actress. I don't think she looks right for Amy, frankly, she's not my Amy. I think the other two are really forgettable, Beth and Emma Watson.
1:14:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:14:44 Dominic Sandbrook? And I think the messing around with the professor, I can understand why they did that. They made him a sexy continental hunk.
1:14:50 Speaker 03 They also want to give Joe a worthy, you know, if she's going to give up her independence, it better be for someone who's, you know, hunky in French.
1:14:57 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a good film. I like the way they play with the timeline and Greta Gerwig has this sort of framing device of her submitting the book of Little Women of Jo having written the book of Little Women, which is nicely done.
1:15:08 Speaker 03 Which the original movie did as well, actually.
1:15:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Really?
1:15:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, but in every adaptation of it, they kind of show the idea that Jo is writing from her real life. That's a big improvement. They always play into that. And also they lean into the whole Louisa May Alcott having pressure from her publishers by when Jo goes to submit her stories, the publisher actually says, and make sure she's married by the end of it.
1:15:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yeah, yeah, they did that. Exactly. They did that a lot.
1:15:32 Speaker 03 And I think Timothy Chalamet's a very good Laurie. Okay, let us rate it out of 10.
1:15:37 Dominic Sandbrook? What are you marking it in?
1:15:39 Speaker 03 I think we should rate it out of earnestly pontificating marmies.
1:15:42 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm gonna stun you with this. I'm gonna give it seven out of 10.
1:15:46 Speaker 03 All right.
1:15:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Because even though I found the first half unbelievably boring,
1:15:52 Dominic Sandbrook? I found bits of the second half very moving. I think it's a really important landmark book. I think it's really interesting. I actually have really enjoyed recording this episode, so I've actually upped my mark during the episode. So I'm gonna give it seven out of 10. Now you, what are you gonna give it?
1:16:06 Speaker 03 Now, at the risk of alienating the three American listeners that we had managed to get on board, I'm so sorry, everyone. I'm gonna give it a five. I agree with you that the second half is is much, much better and much more interesting. And there are some really astute, moving and actually very modern moments that capture what it's like to go from girlhood to womanhood, particularly Jo struggling with herself after Beth's death. But it's just a bit boring. And I got so tired of the relentless moralizing and the sort of slightly forced bonhomie of it all. And I think that the rapid reconciliations at the end are a little bit implausible, the way that Amy and Laurie just get together so quickly, the way that Jo and the professor just get together so quickly. I don't believe that much at all. There's no chemistry. And I will never, ever, ever
1:16:51 Speaker 03 forgive Louisa May Alcott for not letting Jo end up with Laurie. Just think of, think what could have been.
1:16:56 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, it is a bit boring. It is a bit boring, but it can be boring and important, which it is. But honestly, if I was recommending to listeners what to read, if someone said, I'm going on holiday, I want a really, really great classic to read.
1:17:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:17:08 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, it would be a high risk to recommend Little Women.
1:17:11 Speaker 03 I must say, your enemy. Or you thought they really need some genuine kind of moral improving.
1:17:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, why don't you take Little Women and East of Eden and see how you get on.
1:17:20 Speaker 03 And have a long, hard think about God and man and sin.
1:17:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Let us know in the comments, as always, what you made of Little Women and why, I mean, they never say they agree with me, they always say they agree with you.
1:17:30 Speaker 03 I don't know, I think I might get quite a hard time.
1:17:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, give that be a hard time.
1:17:34 Speaker 03 This time, yeah, I'm ready.
1:17:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:17:37 Speaker 03 And on that note.
1:17:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Bye bye, everybody.
1:17:39 Speaker 03 Bye.
1:17:49 Speaker 02 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side, but Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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