[lit-ideas] Re: FW: Read and pass...Fwd. 'Stay the Course!' is not enough
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 00:12:11 EST
In a message dated 1/7/2005 10:46:45 PM Central Standard Time,
JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx writes:
And I can't figure
out when Louisa May Alcott became quaint.
Hi,
And, I was warped by stealing away to read her books when I was a little
girl. (I was probably escaping from picking apples, no doubt as well as from
the rest of the world at Quaker Hill--the old family home on the edge of West
Virginia and Ohio. It had belonged to my grandmother's family for simply
forever (thus the name--and there were the tunnels in it from the Runaway
Slave
era--one of the great uncles [I was really little] took us down to see
them...)--and my grandfather (who never really felt that he had the same sort
of
'roots' as she did and which he had longed for since he was a boy) bought it
from my grandmother's uncle when they were ready for that sort of a home...
It was a magical and mystical sort of place. and so so many books...of all
sorts...(from several generations--he had the books that her family had
owned, too--the few I was given are some of my most precious treasures...)
and I would read and read and read. and that was where I read all of Louisa
May Alcott's books. My favorite, though, was An Old-Fashioned Girl. Talk
about romanticism... In their old-fashioned home with pictures of such
long-ago people scattered about, it was easy to imagine... (maybe that is why
when I
read the Betsy-Tacy books, they connected so easily with me, too...though
they are very different...)
Still--didn't Louisa write murder mysteries, too? Oh, yes--I just pulled
out my copy of An Old-Fashioned Girl and this is what it says about her:
Louisa May Alcott was born in Pennsylvania in 1832, the second youngest of
the four daughters of Bronson Alcott, a prominent social reformer. The family
settled in Concord, Massachusetts, near New England's literary luminaries
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Louisa's
father was unable to earn an adequte living from his work, and by the time she
was
fifteen, Louisa shouldered much of the financial responsibility for her
family, writing everything from serious sketches of the Civil War to lurid
melodramas. Fame and fortune became hers when Little Women was published in
1868.
This was soon folled by Little Men and, later in life, her books written
especially for young adults: Eight Cousins, its sequel Rose in Bloom, and An
Old-Fashioned Girl.
Then the forward talks about how An Old-Fashioned Girl was written:
"...this time, Alcott turned to her own history, to the days before her fame
and
wealth, when she eked out a living in a world where the only reputable
occupation for single women was "spinsterhood". In fact, An Old-Fashioned Girl
is
almost autobiographical in its depiction of the spirited but impoverished
country
girl: Polly Milton. But instead of the hours of writing that Louisa May
Alcott did to earn money, Polly teaches piano. When Polly first comes to Boston
to visit her wealthy friend Fan Shaw, she encounters a small social world made
up of snobbish manners, narrow-minded customs and mean-spirited gossip. She
is astounded to see that Fan and her friends talk only of boys, new dresses
and racy novels. She is astonished at the makeup they wear, the way they pile
their hair high upon their heads and the almost nightly dances and operas they
attend. Polly is, after all, an old-fashioned girl.
She is also very sensitive. When she overhears Fan's friends call her "the
little blackbird" because she wears her one good dress, a black silk, so often,
she almost flees back to the country before her vacation is finished: she
feels as bad as Louisa May Alcott must have, when even at the height of her
success, she had to wear a similar dress at Boston soirees, a black silk that
other guests diplomatically called "familiar".
ME again:
I vaguely remember one of her adult murder mysteries being done by one of
our bookclubs and it being, still, in our Booktalk Collection--so it still must
be read. Cannot remember it, though...
What other books did you each read as a pre-teen or child? Any favorites?
Lost in memories,
Marlena in Missouri
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
