The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark (review)

In 1871, a young girl fleeing the Chicago fire saves a single item from the flames: a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. More than a century later, another young girl pays homage to this beloved text by composing the Louisa May Alcott Cookbook (1985), a selection of recipes for foods mentioned in Little Women, published in the year its nine-year-old author turns twelve. In between these two events, Alcott’s head is featured on a five-cent stamp, a ship is named after her, and a quartet of chimps at the Bronx Zoo is christened Amy, Beth, Jo, and Meg in honor of Little Women’s central characters—not once, not twice, but three times between 1952 and 1960. Meanwhile, a couple of overzealous translators, not content merely to convert Alcott’s most famous story into French and Dutch, revise the ending to make it conclude just as many fans (then and now) wish it would: Jo marries Laurie, not that old fuddy-duddy Professor Bhaer (who, by the way, was played by William Shatner in the 1978 television version of Little Women).

These are just a few of the tantalizing tidbits to be found in Beverly Lyon Clark’s compendious account of The Afterlife of Little Women. This meticulously researched study provides a panoramic overview of the myriad ways in which Alcott’s quasi-autobiographical novel and life story have been embraced, revised, and transformed since Little Women first appeared in 1868–69. I open this review with particulars because therein lies the strength of Clark’s book: The Afterlife of Little Women is comprehensive and contemplative rather than argumentative and evaluative. That Clark has her eye on detail rather than big-picture claims is clear from her introduction. After a brief yet luminous meditation on the mutability of texts and the remoteness of readers, she concludes her introduction with chapter summaries that describe what time periods and types of texts she plans to discuss, never suggesting that a single overarching argument is being made, either in individual chapters or the book as a whole. Ambitious in terms of its historical and generic scope, this book is nevertheless not framed as an intervention that will transform Alcott studies, reception studies, adaptation studies, children’s literature studies, or any other field of academic inquiry; instead, it surveys the various ways that readers and artists have responded to Little Women, leaving others to consider how this treasure trove of information could be put to use.

Such critical diffidence runs counter to prevailing norms of literary and cultural criticism. What does it mean that one of the leading critics in children’s literature studies has chosen to adopt such a militantly modest stance? Clark herself remains silent on this question, yet it seems to me worth pondering, so after outlining what she sets out to do in The Afterlife of Little Women—and does, with awe-inspiring thoroughness and curatorial care—I will play around with several possible reasons why she commits herself so fully to particularities rather than venturing to make broader analytical or methodological claims. My aim is less critical than appreciative: I think the work that Clark does in The Afterlife of Little Women is more generally useful than she herself seems willing to admit.

Clark’s avowed goal is to track trends in the popular and critical reception of Little Women over time. To that end, her four long chapters are organized chronologically, with each one covering a mix of media since Alcott’s story has been recycled and retold in so many different forms over the years. The first chapter, “Becoming Everyone’s Aunt, 1868–1900,” uses a variety of measures to show how well-received Little Women was during this time, including sales figures, publishers’ correspondence, library circulation records, fan letters, and autobiographies of readers. Yet even as Alcott’s popular appeal soared, an initial burst of critical appreciation slowly began to dissipate as cultural gatekeepers increasingly began to...