Louisa May Alcott - Wonderful Woman No. 38

Louisa May Alcott - 1832-1888
American Author

There is no conceivable way I could even begin to write about every book that has ever meant anything to me. From being a babe in arms to the age I have reached, very few days will have passed where I have not either read or been read to. As a child there were many books I loved, notably The Faraway Tree and a number of others by Enid Blyton, The Worst Witch series by Jill Murphy (I longed to be just like Mildred Hubble, flying around on a broomstick), the What Katie Did stories by Susan Coolidge (perhaps there is a theme of untidy girls in this list somewhere) and most fondly remembered is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.
Louisa May Alcott

Little Women is the first book that I remember moving me to tears, it didn't just move me, it completely broke my heart. I remember sobbing and sobbing. And I still love that words on a page can do that, can leap out and grab you and make you think and feel and laugh and cry. What a miserable world this would be without a good book.

I found myself identifying with the character Jo March (who Louisa May had based on herself). She too was a tom-boy, who positively rejected all notions of being lady-like and feminine. She wrote plays and had her sisters act them out, something I remember enforcing on various other children in our neighbourhood when I was growing up. Reflectively, I can see that I was indeed very much like her and may even have grown up with some similarities to the adult Jo in the latter chapters of the book.

Feminine weaknesses and fainting spells are the direct result of our confining young girls to the house, bent over their needlework, and restrictive corsets.
Marmee, Little Women

Louisa May wrote more than thirty other novels, including two sequels to Little Women. Aside from writing, Louisa May was a strong character with definite beliefs about how she saw the world and how it could be bettered; she supported the abolition of the slave trade in the United States and in her later life, she became a staunch supporter of women's suffrage, the subject of which is included in a number of her books, including Little Women. She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

I find it poor logic to say that because women are good, women should vote. Men do not vote because they are good; they vote because they are male, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country.
Jo March, Little Women

I read Little Women for the second time in recent years. It was still a wonderful read, if there were a book I could ask every 9 to 12 year old girl to read, this would be it. And yes, it did make me cry the second time around too.

A clip from the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women: