by Kate Bolick
The enduring appeal of Little Women ensures that readers will continue to contemplate the sisters, thinking and speaking of them as if they were real neighbors, friends, sisters—daughters. If Amy were my child, I would be proud of her—that she worked hard and sorted herself out in a methodical and productive way—and pleased with her, because she understands that pleasing others while adhering to her own goals is a good way to make peace in the family and, more generally, to maneuver through life. There are many women characters in novels (and women in life) who are thoughtful, cautious, observant, intelligent, and ambitious. Quite often, the words used to describe them are “cold,” “calculating,” “money-hungry,” “shallow,” “social-climbing.” I consider these terms unfair and sexist. The artistic and political task that Alcott knows she must complete with Amy, and that she accomplishes, is integrating Amy’s inner life and her actions so that the reader sees the complexity and subtleties of how she starts out and how she has fashioned herself. In some ways, this is more of a challenge than portraying the characters of Meg, Jo, and Beth, and it is evident as part two progresses and Alcott gives more time to Amy, especially to her self-expression, that she enjoys the challenge. Amy’s emergence as a sensitive, thinking adult is one of the novel’s more remarkable accomplishments. Amy is the modern woman, the thoughtful feminist; the sister who stays true to herself, learns to navigate her social world, gains a wisdom and self-knowledge different from that of her sisters, and is more like what we aim to be today.
* “Louisa May Alcott,” Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, uub.org.
KATE BOLICK’S first book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, is a distant descendant of Louisa May Alcott’s writings about the single life. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at New York University, but her heart remains in her hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, not far from where Little Women was born.
JENNY ZHANG is the author of the story collection Sour Heart and the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. She is the recipient of the Pen/Bingham Award for Debut Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the forthcoming memoir In the Dream House. She’d like to thank Susan Bailey—independent scholar and webmaster of Louisa May Alcott is My Passion—for generously sharing her transcriptions of Lizzie Alcott’s surviving letters, and Will Gregg at Harvard University’s Houghton Library for his assistance. She still thinks Jo should have let Amy drown.
JANE SMILEY has written many books for adults and children. Her most famous, A Thousand Acres, is not her favorite, but she learned a lot from writing it. Her favorites are lighter in tone—Horse Heaven, Moo, and her current kids’ horse series. The second volume, about a contrary nine-year-old, was published in the spring of 2019. She is working on a nonfiction book titled Five Mothers, about her great-grandmother, her grandmother, her mother, herself, and her daughter. It will be published once all her relatives stop coming up with new information.