Far away in the sunshine . . .

Louisa May Alcott on reaching. (The Commonplace Book Project)

“Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” — Louisa May Alcott, as quoted in Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book

I was nine years old the first time I read Little Women.

I’m not sure I have words for how it affected me. It was the first real novel I’d ever read. Jo March was the first character who I really, truly fell in love with. She was awkward and wasn’t sure where she fit in and her imagination was too big for her body . . . just like me.

I didn’t exactly want to be Jo March. I wanted her to be my best friend. I wanted to make a secret sorority with her. Every time I roped my sisters into putting on a play with me, I channeled her.

And when two later, an author (Tomie dePaola) came to speak to my school and it finally occurred to me that real people wrote the books I loved— it was Louisa May Alcott I really wanted to be.

Which is okay, because she was Jo March.

Little Women has been my favorite book for almost forty years. It was written more than a hundred years before the first time I read it. There was a Little Women movie released in 2018 and another one due in 2019, in time for it’s 150th birthday.

I enjoyed this New Yorker article about Little Women and Louisa May Alcott.

Some people complain that university syllabuses don’t accord “Little Women” the status of “Huckleberry Finn,” which they see as its male counterpart. But no piece of literature is the counterpart of “Little Women.” The book is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel.

I read more than 200 children’s books for my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. One of my very favorites was the 1934 Newberry winner, Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs. It’s a biography of Louisa May Alcott, written in story form for children.

For a more adult biography, try Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography.

PBS produced an Alcott biopic called Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women.

Alcott was taught by David Thoreau (unfamous, because he didn’t actually become famous until after his death) and her next door neighbor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who mentored her. Nathaniel Hawthorne was another neighbor.

Let that soak in for a minute.

When she was about seven her father enrolled her in a school taught by Thoreau, then 23. Thoreau often took his students out of the classroom into the woods. He taught them about birds and flowers, gathering lichens, showing them a fox den and deer tracks, feeding a chipmunk from his hand.

Louisa May Alcott was a prolific writer. And she wrote to earn a living.

While she was obviously wealthy in the mentor department, she grew up in poverty, with eccentric parents. She made a promise to herself to ‘to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.’

She did not set out to become a children’s book writer. Little Women was not her favorite of her own multitude of works. But the book gave her what she wanted most . . . a giant step back from the edge and the ability to comfortably write for the rest of her life.

Little Women has been made into multitudes of films. My favorite is the 1933 version starring Katherine Hepburn as Jo March.

Today’s Poem:

Thoreau’s Flute by Louisa May Alcott

Alcott wrote this poem after Thoreau’s death. It was published in the Atlantic in 1863.

Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.