The Magic Combination of Family and Books: Jo Lighting the Way

I have always regretted that I didn't encounter Little Women as girl. I was no longer a little woman but in my early twenties when I first read Louisa May Alcott's classic in a graduate course on American literary realism. As it turned out, though, Jo still helped light the way toward my possible future, as she has for so many generations of girls. Like most master's students, I still struggled to imagine life beyond the safe confines of postgraduate education. But Jo gave me hope that one day I'd manage to have the things in life that most mattered to me.

The scene that most stands out from my memories of that first reading is in the final chapter, "Harvest Time." Jo has married Professor Bhaer, and they have had two sons and established a school for boys at Plumfield. I know that this scene should have been a great disappointment to me, that I should have been angry at Alcott for marrying Jo off to a stodgy, old professor, or simply for marrying her off at all. I should have cringed when Jo looked back on her earlier dreams of becoming a famous author and decided, "the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now" (379). It was the next line, however, that leaped off the page at me: "I haven't given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I'm sure it will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations as these" (379; emphasis added). She then points to her sons and students, as well as to her father and husband.

The idea that having a family could not only be compatible with literary ambitions but could actually enrich one's writings (particularly for women) was a revelation to me. I'd only ever heard the opposite. As I discovered in my subsequent PhD research, such an optimistic forecast has been virtually absent from women's literature. Today's women writers still struggle to reconcile their lives as mothers with their literary ambitions. The same is true, of course, for women academics. In my own life I was fortunate to finish my first book just before my daughter was born, to work on an anthology while she was young, and then to begin writing books again while she was away at school during the day (funded by grants that released me from teaching). Although it's never been easy, and I've made many sacrifices in my career because of my family, I can say that my most recent book, a biography of Little Women released for the 150th anniversary, would not have been the same without the presence of my book-loving, Jo-resembling, Harry Potter–obsessed teenage daughter in my life. She informed Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters in so many ways and definitely made it a "better" book.