Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

23:10And if she doesn't get in her little commentary, not little, her pretty serious commentaries and satires of different people and places and practices, I don't think it ages very well. It just becomes sort of an overly saccharine, you know, confection of a certain kind. And I think I want to talk a little bit more about what she does to keep it from being overly sweet. And one of the things is the real life events. And here's a spoiler alert here. And we're not going to do this very often, but this is a big one. If you don't know this, it doesn't happen in the first volume. It happens in the second half of the book.

23:45It happens in Good Wives. But Beth dies from lingering complications of scarlet fever. Alcott herself had a sister who died a little bit older, but under not dissimilar circumstances. And Beth is largely pattered on her. And then from there, it's pairing off the girls, right? Beth dies and you start pairing off the girls and see what happens. And each one of them is like a slight wrinkle on what a more formulaic version would be, who marries who and why and how old they are and what their pretty poor representation of dialect on the page are, let's say. That's one of my notes for Alcott. We need to work on our dialect.

24:19But it's interesting and different if not feeling exactly revolutionary or edgy.

24:27Jeff:Yeah, that second section, Good Wives, opens with Meg's wedding. It's primarily concerned with her settling into wifedom. She becomes a mother. The other girls go and make their matches. Lori falls for Joe, but Joe does not have feelings for Lori. And Lori ultimately ends up with Amy, who is the youngest sister. She's the artist. Joe marries an older German professor and goes on to run a school for boys out of their home. So they are kind of making either unexpected or unconventional matches here. There are surprises for the reader. It's definitely Alcott subverting the things that readers asked her to do.

25:03Jeff:And I couldn't help but think about how, like, one of the things that we say about kids' movies today is that they work on two levels. The good ones work on the level where the kids get the jokes, but also there's another level where there's something there for the adults. And I think Alcott does that really well in Little Women, that if you're a child and you're just reading this story and falling in love with these girls, and there are four different kind of Jungian archetypes of different kind of girl you could be, you could map yourself on to one of them. But then there's also that Alcott's sharp commentary for the adults, if you're willing to read it.

25:38Jeff:And I think that that's part of what makes this age so well, is that especially women readers who read this as kids, kind of it's a tag yourself moment. Like you decide that you're a Joe, you're a Meg. Are you a Miranda or a Carrie? For those of you who are in the 90s and 2000s, very similar in that regard. And as you grow up, as you become an adult, you can revisit this book and still identify with those characters, but also see the criticism that Alcott has layered on about the marriage plot, about expectations of women in society, about the constraints on femininity. And even though the particulars of it haven't aged super well into 2025.

26:17Jeff:And like I mentioned on a Book Riot Instagram video that I was reading this for the show and a couple of people commented like, wish I could show that to my daughters, but it doesn't align with our values anymore. Like, I get that. And also there are ways into talking about criticism and commentary and progress from this book. Yeah, I think, I mean, that's one of the projects of this show is to give the context is like, this was a subversive story at the time. And it's better that it existed than it didn't for all kinds of reasons. If you read it just as a straight text now, it's not the same.

26:54And some of the things Gerwig does in the modern version, I mean, again, it's set in the same time. It's not like bringing Little Women into like 2015 or something like that. is it uses the kind of moral and ethical DNA and makes it a little more recognizable to a modern person who's sympathetic to issues of gender equality and autonomy and especially stuff around money and class. For sure, I like this here that this is a kind of maybe the female myth. That's one of the interesting things that literature and stories can do is provide models for people's imaginations. and even as they allow new ways of thinking, they also then shape it at the same time.

27:37So like it's harder to break out of that new myth, but that new myth also then gives you something else to do. And that's one thing that's very much going on is these girls and their parents too, not for nothing, are trying to figure out how to exist in the world in which they're in, but also do it their own way, right? This is not the boat rocker scene where they're like storming out and like doing everything in Field of Dreams. But they're also not just bowing their heads and going along to get along. They're finding a compromise that allows them to live peacefully without being sort of imprisoned and make a meager living, but also define for themselves their own ethic, their own morality.

28:17And that was very much in the water of this romantic period. And especially as Alcott is growing up pre-Civil War, like it's hard to remember now how important the abolitionist movement was as sort of an on the ground situation to get people to start the Civil War. Like, we're not going to let this happen anymore. And women were at the forefront of this and people like the Alcott. So like this kind of like emergent critical consciousness that is found in small ways in this book are the building blocks on which later like Alcott's a suffragist. I have to believe that this book mattered in the acceleration of the women's suffrage movement over the next 30 years.

28:58I don't know how much, but a lot of the people that were reading and cared about women's suffrage were literate women. And this was a fantastically important book to the people that would be 20 and 30 by the time we get into the early 20th century when that really picked up steam. So, again, I can't draw a straight line. But I don't know, Rebecca, is that I mean, is that overstating it? But I kind of feel it has to matter.

29:18Jeff:I think it does. She's not just as Alcott's not just a suffragette. She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts. That's right. Yeah. Just truly a groundbreaker, an outspoken feminist. She was a spenster. She never married. She wrote for decades, but felt really pigeonholed into the kinds of books that Little Women was because of her professional success. But she chafed against that the whole time because she was, again, raised by and around these really radical thinkers of the time. And she's like Little Women is implicitly about what it is to be poor and white. Like it's overtly about class.

29:59Jeff:It doesn't talk at all. race. Like, even as they mention that father is off fighting the war, there's no discussion on the page of what the war is over or the rights of Black people or the horrors of slavery or any of that stuff. But we know that Alcott personally was concerned with it because her family is so intimately involved in the abolition movement and that she continues her father's work forward as an educator and a writer. And not only that, like, this inspired countless women activists and writers ever since. Simone de Beauvoir cites Little Women as an important influence. On the other end of the pop culture spectrum, Nora and Delia Efren both cite Little Women as important.

30:44Jeff:Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Jumpa Lahiri, Stephanie Meyer, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Elena Ferrante. Just to name a few, we could do another hour on women writers who said that they were influenced by the works of Louise May Alcott and Little Women specifically. And that that list is so diverse in like the racial makeup, in the cultural backgrounds, in the political perspectives that those women write about in the milieus that they work in really says something about like there is something almost universal about the appeal of this book. Your little one grew three inches overnight.

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32:31Jeff:Plus, keep landscaping fresh with Stay Green 1-cubic-foot garden soil. Five bags for$10. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Valid through 4A. While supplies last, selection varies by location. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. And the publication showed this. Like, the initial print run of 2 ,000 sold out almost immediately. The printer and publisher had an extremely difficult time keeping it in print. One of the notices is the literary sensation of the season. I guess they still had seasons or they'd already invented seasons in 1868 and 1869. There was an omnibus edition in 1880. Very interesting subplot here where there was a boulderized version.

33:12If you don't know that term, it means sanitized. So it took out a lot of Alcott's language and dumbed down the literary references. And there's a lot of zero to well-read bingo here, Rebecca, and things we could get to in the future. A lot of Shakespeare references. We get some Keats. And then stuff that has faded away, which I might talk about a little bit later just to see. But really fascinating to see how literary these young girls are. I have a hot take about this coming up. I don't know if you looked at the notes, but we'll get to that in a little bit. Let's see. There we go. AI generated editions.

33:45I'm just not going to touch this. You have this in the notes. I'm not talking about AI generated editions, Rebecca. I don't want to do this.

33:49Jeff:It makes it tough. Like, that's just along with the fact that it's been in public domain for so long. Like, the book's been in print for 157 years since its publication. It has never fallen out of print. And the existence of public domain and now AI is just another one of the things that makes it hard for us to know exactly how widespread Little Women is. I just think we should assume that these estimates of sales and estimates of popularity are way under reality. Yeah. We talked a lot about Alcott here, I think picking up a couple of things the rest of her life. She never married. She wanted to be a writer and she wrote for money explicitly.

34:28She wrote these lurid thrillers. And there's a little bit of that in the second section, right, where she is out getting money and feeling, I'm sorry, Joe, and now conflating them like millions of people have. And that's okay. But let's get it right. Thank you for that. And she kind of feels ashamed about getting the money. This is a book about being a writer, the second half, especially in the economic realities and also the opportunities there. I say you don't want to know the inflation-adjusted money Joe was getting for some of the stuff because she's getting bank, Rebecca. She got like$100 for this one story.

35:01And today's dollars, I think that's like$10 ,000 if I have this right. Anyway, there's a lot of there.

35:06Jeff:It's tough out there for freelance writers. There's also like a real side note for the options that were available to women and the economic viability of being a writer over time that both Alcott and Joe are looking for financial independence. And the thing that they choose is writing. Is writing. Yes. And that is the pathway to financial independence for both of them, which much more difficult today. Almost every writer that you see on a shelf, even many bestsellers, are work and day jobs. They're teaching. A lot of them just have office jobs. It's tough to be a writer who can fully support themselves just on their writing income.

35:44Jeff:And like, I mean, the options were really limited to Alcott and to Joe. But interesting that they were both like willing to take a kind of mercenary approach to writing fiction and write whatever paid, at least for a time. And out of circumstance, right? They did not have a comfortable middle class or upper middle class existence. They were not interested in, you know, I don't know what even the availabilities of being like a high artist and write for nothing, I guess, as a hobby or try to get published in other places. but it's very much a story within a story about making it work and finding some compromise.

36:21I'm going to keep using that term between a literary life and putting food on the table. And some real politic happens there. Alcott herself, this is one of those situations where the book gets away from the author in this regard, which she continued to write but never really had another hit like this. And people start to think of her. And I think we start to think of her. I'll say this. I think people don't know how radical Alcott and her circle were and how interesting of a thinker and writer and person the world Alcott is because Little Women has sort of softened into embroidered pillow of a people's reading experience or understanding of it.

36:58But it's not that exact. I mean, it isn't that at the same time.

37:01Jeff:I think you're onto something there that like sort of the popular cultural imagination of Little Women is like a live, laugh, love poster. And it's it is so much sharper than that. And like Joe has especially sharp elbows that she's not afraid to throw. Alcott throws some elbows at the publishing industry, at the institution of marriage. Yeah, at readers, at conventions of modern society. There's a lot of things and institutions take strays through Little Women in a way that, I mean, to take us into our first exposure, I first read this book when I was eight. I think it was right for my reading level at the time, but wrong for being able to actually connect to the story.

37:45Jeff:So I have felt on the outside of that community of women who love this book. Because you were, what, three or four years too early, do you think? I think so. What if you had read it when you were 13 or 12? I think if I had read it at 12 or 13, instead of like, at that point, I had already jumped into all of the Oprah book club picks. I think that I would have connected to Joe and that like sense of independence. But so many women have lifelong connections to this book. I've always envied them. And this was my first reading of it since. And I really appreciated how sharp Alcott is. And I kind of expected this to feel like homework for me, if we should cover little women.

38:22Jeff:Like a museum piece of a kind. Exactly. Exactly. But it felt much more alive than I expected to. And that was really wonderful to find. Yeah, for me, I think I was 12, maybe 11. I remember picking it out at the library. I've told this story before on the Book Riot podcast, but I went through a phase when I was in fifth and sixth grade of wanting to read all the longest books in my elementary school library. I read Last of the Mohegans. I read some other stuff. And this one, because it was an omnibus volume, was a big boy. So I picked it up and I read it. And let's just say Joe was very important to 12-year-old me at that moment.

38:55Joe's important to everyone. I don't remember having seen a character. Again, even at that point, I was like, whoa, that's something else going on right there. I think I was also, I was reading all kinds of stuff. A formidable character. Yeah. I like Joe. I also read a bunch of Nancy Drews when I was, I was real sick for a couple weeks. I read like 30 Nancy Drew books in a row. And then I read Little Women. I was like, oh, Joe, Joe, Joe, greater than sign Nancy Drew for me.

39:22Jeff:30 Nancy Drew books in a short period of time will rewire your brain, though. Yeah, right. Like everyone's trying to murder me. And why is everyone so well dressed all the time? What's it like to read this now? And what is it all about? So what was your experience of reading it there? What did you what did you take away? What were some of the big things that you got from this? I found it to be so warm. Yeah. You use the word affirming earlier, and I hadn't thought of that, but it feels right. As a person who doesn't have kids in my real life, I love to be dropped into the warm chaos of someone else's family.

39:56Jeff:Like, I've experienced this coming to visit you. Yeah, I know. I was going to say, are you just at me next time, Rebecca? Thank you very much. Going to visit other friends whose kids I adore being around and dropping into this book felt a lot like that. Just being kind of sitting on the couch while family life happens around you. I mean, it's just really lovely. I expected it to be, again, like a live, laugh, love pillow. I expected to find that it was like too sweet. It wasn't that at all, the sharpness of the commentary. and the consistency with which that happens. It's not like Alcott just drops in one or two lines.

40:34Jeff:Almost every time a character is having to make a choice or is bumped up against performing conventional expectations, Alcott gives us something to tell us that either she doesn't love that that's what's happening or the character herself doesn't love that that's what's happening and wishes something bigger. There's still women's situation has improved a whole lot. since 1868, but there is still something familiar for a modern woman reader in these characters of feeling the pressures of external definition and of what it is to have society respond to you when you make an unconventional choice.

41:16Jeff:I probably don't have to explain my childlessness nearly as often as Louisa May Alcott or Joe would have had to, but there's a common thread there that I I was surprised and really pleased to find. I would love to know. I looked, and again, there weren't 13-year-old contemporary reactions, but I would love to know what a 13-year-old reader's experience of this was in 1869. When they see Joe explicitly say, if I do that, you know, go marry and have kids and do that thing, I don't get to do X. I don't get to do, I don't get to be a writer. I don't get to run around and roll around in the fields and have idle thoughts and do everything.

41:52But, like, I wonder how much that blew people's hair back at 13 and 14 and 18 and 16. I'd love to know that. Maybe I should bring back a bit I used to do. I can't remember what this was for. If you could get back in the DeLorean and go to around the time this book came out, what question would you ask a reader? I think that my number one thing, for girls especially who loved this book and thought of themselves as literary or wanted something for their life that they maybe even couldn't imagine at the same time. Like, did they have a shock of recognition there? And what was that like?

42:25Jeff:I love this question. Do you think this drove parents crazy, like more conservative parents who bought what looked like a typical girl's story? Do you think like girls got inspired to be a little bit rebellious by this and their parents were like, oh, that damn little women? Yeah, I think it's just because of the ultimate marriage plot resolution. I think some of that is sanded off, but it's still implicitly in there. And especially there are future books in this series. I say we haven't talked about this all. She goes on to write Little Men and some other things in the long future of the March sisters.

42:58I don't know that history, but I know that, you know, Joe and Professor Bear do end up having kids and it's not all like settling into a Norman Rockwell painting. Norman Rockwell actually more subversed than people think, but that's a whole other podcast series we should do. But I do think I have to believe it. Right. Because even now I feel a little bit of like echoes of electricity through time. The quote I was thinking about immediately is this is from the movie Wonder Boys. I think it's in the book, too. But, you know, to Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas's characters are breaking into someone's house.

43:33weirdly it's too complicated to explain and toby mcguire's like this is just nice and he can't really articulate what it is and grady tripp is douglas's character says it's the kind of house you want to wake up on christmas morning and and i think that captures it and we wake up on christmas morning that's where we start in that hustle and bustle and that charming exciting affirming beehive-like quality that can happen around the holidays where there's a lot going on energy is high and anxiety there's a twins of anxiety too but also a fellow feeling and productive enveloping uh activity at the same time um things happen in this book rebecca but there is not a plot this is charging these girls through a couple of different series of years in their lives insofar as there's a plot it's what going to become of these girls right that's that's the plot um and we start to figure out more and more but there isn't a big whatever.

44:29We wonder, is Mr. March going to come home? I'm going to talk about that a little bit more in a second. And we get to the second volume. Is Beth going to be okay? She's very sick in the first volume. She recovers, but we get the sense that this is still pretty bad. And some other things happen, but there's not really a plot. And your experience of this is spending time with this family presented in this particular way. Bad things happen. It's a family saga for kids. Bad things happen and people behave badly. And then they apologize. Yeah. Radical candor. Did Alicia Alcott invent radical candor?

45:06Jeff:I did think about Kim Scott and radical candor. Yeah. The mischief, the play, people make up. There's a lot of forgiveness. Forgiveness is one that they do. They behave badly. I think Amy destroying Joe's manuscript is one of the top six worst things anyone's ever done that didn't land someone in prison or with physical injury. Like a lot of caveats there. Yeah, I mean, it was it's bad. It is bad. Super bad. They're they I mean, and this as a person who is a sister and has a sister, this feels true to me to what sisterhood can be, that it can be explosive in your anger for each other and also all consuming in your love and affection for your sister.

45:50Jeff:And sometimes those things are trying to coexist where you have done something horrible in a moment of anger and you need to go and make repair. They also all of these characters, again, because moral instruction is on the page and they're inspired overtly by Pilgrim's Progress. Like they do a lot of self-reflection there. Each of the girls is trying to identify what their personal moral flaws are or their biggest weaknesses. What is your worst tendency? Is it selfishness? Is it that you crave nicer things than the family can afford? Is it that you're not content? And then they're all trying to, in their own ways, work through those things.

46:27Jeff:And early on, self-help, really. Personal development, moral aspiration. There's a lot about virtue and how that plays out in family life. Their parents are teaching them directly about what kind of person they want to be in the world, about what the family's values are. and then each of the girls has her own moment, at least once, with Marmee, where they go to their mother and say either like, here's this bad thing that I've done, or here's this thing that I'm worried about, or here's this thing that I've found in myself, and what do I do about it? Because I want to be good, but it's hard. It's hard to be good.

47:05Jeff:And their parents do a lot of that work with them. If it is hard to be good, and here's what we think it means to be good, how are you going to square the complexity of what we think it means to be good with these things that you want and which one of those is going to win out i think mr and mrs march are the most archetypally perfect parents in any novel i've ever read say more because they get along their instruction of their kids is gently firm they've got real ideas. They don't dominate the story, but they're there. But they're also subject to sadness as well. And like, you know, at one point, Marmee, which is the name they call their mother, you know, she is told that Mr.

47:54March is very sick and she needs to go take care, you know, go to be with him. And she kind of falls apart for a second. And she's like, children, children, help me bear it. So she's real at this moment. And I think my favorite quote is down here that I have this idea of the sublimated female anger. And she says, I am angry very nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it. And I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another 40 years to do it. So they're real people, Rebecca, but they're also successfully, as you say, they don't think they're going to be perfect, but they think they can in a real spirit of like American Puritanist, um, go get, you know, moral go getter.

48:37Them. It's like, I can, I can, I can overcome this. It may not, you know, I'm a recovering angry person. Like kind of, we use alcohol. I'm never going to be over it. And it's an everyday not to feel it. But I think that that quote probably best incapulates the tunis of Alcott as anything I can find. Like the anger and the subversiveness is there. but also the tamping down and the control that she's modeling and trying to, I don't know if this made it more digestible for readers, or this is how Alcott thought about herself. But I think that is an extremely fascinating passage for this, because Jo is wrestling with her own anger.

49:17That's what elicits this response. She's like, she is so angry at Amy for this. She's like, I can't, what am I going to do? I lose myself in these moments. How do I deal with this? She's unmade by her own emotion. And her mom says, yep, I was like that, too. And it's still there. But you don't have to always be subject to it all the time. There are ways of getting through this. I've seen that completely fascinating at the same time.

49:42Jeff:And really resonates with the progress part of Pilgrim's Progress, that the book itself is a trajectory, a traveling from hell to heaven through a purgatory of a journey into trying to be a good and actualized person. Yeah. John Bunyan's early 16th century allegory for sort of a Christian's trials and tribulations. They each get a copy of this for Christmas and are happy with it. And they're so happy. I mean, books are expensive, Rebecca. That may be the most unbelievable moment for me where they were all uniformly overjoyed to get a single copy of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Hard out there, I guess, for a reader.

50:25I also have here that the everyday goings-on of life are life. And this is, I think, a more modern sensibility in some ways, but there was a realist movement going on in American literature and English literature at the same time, really starting in the mid-19th centuries, of presenting everyday people doing everyday things. And this is certainly in that category here. Let's see, what else do you want to talk about from our reading experiences that you pulled out?

50:53Jeff:The real quality of neighborliness, like also to speak to the warmth of the book, the family really are in community and they have this interdependence. Like the Lawrence family living, well, Laurie and his grandfather next door are so wealthy, much more so than the Marches. But the March family has something to offer them. And the Lawrences are offering financial support. But at one point, the March girls like help pack up. Is it on Christmas that they pack up? The Hummels. Interesting. Yeah. And the big Christmas breakfast and they take it over. They take all of this food over to another family in the community.

51:29Jeff:Joe cuts off her hair to make money to help support the family and other members of the community. There's there are always people coming and going like there's a kind of a real open door policy in this community. Folks are just dropping by. And I loved seeing that. I think that is something that people connect to today in this story because we are we crave it. This is a year of interminable headlines about a very real loneliness epidemic. And this book is a model, showing us an illustration of the way that it has been, the way that it could be, what it is to be really in community and to have something to offer, even if the thing that you can offer is not financial.

52:11Yeah. The other thing that's important about the Hummels is it shows what real destitution looks like because they talk about being poor. But Alcott also includes in the text for us an example of what the marches are not, which is destitute. It's not really ever presented to us as they're not going to be able to eat. they maybe have one dress and maybe it's out of fashion, but that's different than the Hummels where they have like open windows, right? And they don't have enough to eat. And that Christian charity here, which is a largely a secularized morality, that's like one thing that happens here as we move from the Bible to Pilgrim's Progress.

52:47And this itself, this book itself is a kind of moral instruction, but it's including modern fictive elements and concerns and really make it to secular. But I think the presence of the Hummels, Beth's sickness, and I think crucially initially for the book, because those two other things are there at the beginning. But from the beginning, we know that Mr. March is away at war. And that sharpness, that darkness, I think really cuts what would be too sweet, could have been too sweet. Otherwise, even with all the aversive stuff like the specter of tragedy is always around all of us all the time. But here it's very much for them.

53:25And even this moment, Beth says, we've got father and mother and each other, said Beth contendly from her corner. Four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again, as Joe said sadly, but we haven't got father and shall not have him for a long time. She didn't say perhaps never, but each silently added it, thinking of father far away where the fighting was. So we get this very snow globe Christmas moment, but right away, instantly, it's also, and yet, right? And yet, the devil is at the door, and this moment is made more precious by how special, contingent, and fleeting its circumstances really can be.

54:05Jeff:It also really sets a baseline of the expectation of sacrifice and a point of comparison that they're not doing struggle Olympics here, but they do remind themselves. Like, this is a small sacrifice that I can make because father is off fighting at war or because our neighbor lost his son in the war. Like, it is literally very much harder in other places and other ways of life. And so this little thing that I'm being asked to do that feels like a big deal, like, they find a way to validate that for themselves, that it is painful or it's hard to make this sacrifice. And also, it could be a lot worse.

54:44Jeff:This is kind of a, this is the least that I can do while people are out there fighting and dying. Yeah, which I don't think actually works on people a lot, but it works here. It does. So many people have it worse and it feels like it should work, but emotionally often it doesn't work at the same time. Planning a wedding shouldn't feel overwhelming. The Knot brings everything together in one place. Vendors who get your vibe, a custom planning checklist, guest list tools, and a free wedding website that syncs with it all. So instead of juggling a dozen apps and spreadsheets, you can actually enjoy getting married.

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55:54Jeff:Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time! New friends. Gary the Snake. And your last name? The Snake. Dream Team. New habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney Plus Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney Plus and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer ends March 24th. After three months, plan auto-renews and$12.99 a month terms apply. Speaking of Beth, I have a question for you. I was thinking about this a lot. Is Beth's death the saddest moment in English literary canon?

56:33I'm sure there's sadder things that happen in books people don't reference, but I'm talking about the kinds of books people, the kinds of moments that people might have experienced. I'll give you the candidates I thought about. If you've got other candidates, people can email us at zerotowellreadatbookriot.com. Sophie's Choice. If you don't know what that is, do not Google it.

56:52Jeff:It's a tough one. By William Styron, and it was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. We're spoiler people here, so maybe fast forward a few minutes if you don't want to know what happens in books that have been out for 100 years, but here we go. Charlotte dying in Charlotte's Web. I mean, that might be the top of my list because you're so young the first time you read it that it's just devastating. You could be six. You could be six. I'll include both of the Immortal Dead dog books here, where the red fern grows an old yeller. Old Yeller gets bonus points because the kid has to shoot his own dog.

57:24Jeff:I know I have read these books, and I have wiped them both from my memory. I can't. That's a trauma response, Rebecca. That's okay. Yeah. Yes, it's fine. My body has kept the score. We're not talking about Old Yeller. I'm including the endings of Bridge to Terabithia and Tale of Two Cities. It's two of the saddest endings of books of all time. The thing that's different about Bethdesk, it's like right in the middle. And it's also, again, kind of matter of fact. The girls recognize that it's coming. They have this quiet moment. Joe and Beth have this quiet moment together where Joe realizes that Beth is dying and that Beth has known this for a while.

57:58Jeff:And Beth acknowledges it to Joe. And it kind of seems that Beth is, like, fading away and starting to be this ethereal creature. And she goes gently. You almost have to read it twice. Wait, wait, she just died? She's dead. Beth just died right there. That's it? That's one of the things about Little Women is like so many terrible things happen that get like a one sentence mention where I had a lot of notes of like this is the like original trauma for an entire novel in 2025. I also have Kiowa's death in The Things They Carried by Tim O 'Brien. That's a more of a modern one, if you know that. But I think we will get to Things They Carried at some point.

58:33Jeff:We're going to cry through that entire episode someday. That's a shared special book for both of us. And then that scene in Beloved. And that's more of a horror scene, I would say. but certainly traumatic. But in terms of just straight sadness, I think this is the saddest one I previewed. I didn't see you put a hot take here. Would you like to say what your hot take is? I think that, I mean, it's truly a hot take, just to antagonize that it's the saddest moment in English literature is actually Amy burning Joe's manuscript. That might be the most enraging, again, within the, you know. You know, I'm not a big crier, and especially with books, it takes a lot to get me going.

59:11Jeff:And I did notice like there was the prickle of tears. The mucous membranes were fired up. They were warming up there. And when I realized that that's what was going on with Joe and Beth, it's hard to beat Charlotte dying. I gotta say. But the one that gets me choked up just thinking about it. I didn't include it here because I think this is maybe too dad or parent core. But the end of the last Winnie the Pooh book where Chris Robin talked about how he's not going to be able to come back anymore. And I'm like, oh, my. I was reading that to my kids and I literally start crying when they were like, I've never even tried to do that because every parent I know has been like, oh, my God.

59:46Jeff:Oh, my God. All right. We're moving on to idle thoughts. I've got a few here. These are things. So if you don't know, these are things we don't necessarily believe. We're not arguing this, but we don't not believe. We don't not think maybe at the same time. They occurred to us while we were. They occurred to us. we are indeed dumber now if you look at the inventiveness and creativity of the kids to entertain themselves they make a newspaper they put on plays, they're making stuff all the time they're going to perform Hamlet? they're learning fencing so that their home production of Hamlet will be better Rebecca we're dumber now you're dumber now yeah we're going to rubber stamp that one we are dumber now I've got, are we sure Alcott wouldn't like another crack at the dialect?

1:00:42Both bears, Hannah's, some other people. She's trying to capture a mix of European accents. No Professor Higgins is she, I will say, for the representation. It's a little tough.

1:00:55Jeff:It's a little tough. This is a real random one. Did you Google this or did you just wonder it? This is an idle thought. I don't spend time on the idle thoughts. They're just here. When were pools invented that you like have rich people would have in their house? Because they're around by Gatsby. People have pools. And there's a moment here where I thought Laurie was actually by a pool because they have this big house and there's something about him laying around. And I immediately imagined Laurie by a pool somehow. And I was like, wait, no, they don't have pools. My guess is some combination of chemical understanding of how that could keep that stuff from killing you, but just having open bodies of water.

1:01:27And you needed electricity for a filtration system. So sometimes sort of after Edison. But anyway, that was a story.

1:01:35Jeff:Somewhere between 1868 and 1920. Yeah, somewhere in there. We have pools. So that's a book I would read about the invention of the leisure pool. The Long-Term Stability of Freelance Writer Rates. Jo gets a dollar a column, which as far as I research is equaled about$100 today. And a side note, she writes, the publication she writes for is the Spread Eagle, Rebecca. Incredible stuff. What is that? Don't ask. When did the Spread Eagle become perverse? Well, I mean, one of the things that she's asked to write is a romance that's short and spicy. How spicy was her romance column for The Spread Eagle?

1:02:10Jeff:These are unanswerable questions. Unanswerable questions. I'd get in the DeLorean and get an edition of The Spread Eagle just to see what the spicy reading is there. A sustaining membership subscription to The Spread Eagle. This is another idle thought. So Pride and Prejudice is written 50 years before this, 1813, I think. I'm pretty sure. This is the life that the Bennett sisters were afraid of falling into, represented by the marches. Like they have this estate, you know, they need to all get married because it's entailed to this other person. Like it's a whole thing. But they're afraid into falling into a position where they've got to work.

1:02:42They have to be a governess. They've got to sew. They've got to take in washing. And it's just interesting to see like that's what is seen to these landed gentry, minor landed gentry. This is what they see as being like a horrible fate that you can't even speak of. I just thought that was interesting to talk about. You've got a couple here.

1:03:03Jeff:Yeah, I mean, I've said it already, but I think Joe and Lori's vibe as co-conspirators is real friendship goals. And like co-conspirators is what they felt like to me. They are just delighted and mischievous with each other. Each of them frees the other one up to a mode of expression and a mode of being that they don't have really with anybody else in their lives. It is just so much fun. And I will count Alcott as a hero for not putting them together in the end. I understand why readers of Little Women wanted Joe and Laurie to get together. And I was so, so glad that there was no kissing between the two of them and that they have the difficult conversation.

1:03:43Jeff:He's in love with her. It's a great scene. Like, you have to have it out because it's sort of been hanging between them since before they can even remember. And you just got to do it. And she's like, it's never going to happen. And he says, can't you try? And she's like, I don't want it to be that way. I don't want to have to try to love somebody. This is like this friendship that we have is the thing. And that's what I want from you. And that he comes around and comes to see that he can treasure their friendship. And that can be enough for him from Joe. It's just so good. It's so, so wonderful.

1:04:20Jeff:Also, I personally, as the kooky aunt, found Aunt March to be it. You're not much of a drag. She's a drag, man. You don't want to be Aunt March. No, she's I mean, she is very critical. She's kind of a drag, but she's also like the rich aunt who will take you to Europe. She is a little kooky. She does like take the girls in at different points in their lives. Like, I don't want to be that kind of drag, but she's an interesting model for. Yeah, I think it's so interesting what happens to the estate. Right. because in the end she eventually leaves it to the girls. And what they choose to do with her estate versus what she did, it was sort of rattle around it by herself and judge people, which is to open up and use it.

1:04:59I mean, I think her, she's not the villain, but she represents largely conventional morality. She's allowed to see the things that the readers know to be the quote-unquote right thing to do in any situation would be.

1:05:11Jeff:But she's an archetype of like kooky aunt who's gonna, like often these characters are double-edged swords. Like they're going to unlock some things for you and they're going to be difficult to be around. I would like to be the kooky, fun part of that. Yeah, I think you can keep the structure and leave the scold. Back to your note about like we're dumber now. I also have like no wonder the outcasts were fighting for education reform because there is a casual mention in a scene when Amy's at school of the teacher seeing 50 pairs of eyes pointed at him. 50 kids in one class is way too many. Whoa, way too many.

1:05:44Just way too many. Yeah, the ratio there wouldn't pass the State Board of Accreditation at this point.

1:05:49Jeff:This stray thought I could not let go of was like, does Marmee actually let it go too far when she lets the girls fuck around and find out? It's just a bird, Rebecca. I don't know what to tell you. She lets the bird die. Better the bird than your kids. She's like, the girls don't want to do their chores. And she's like, fine, see what it's like to be all play and no work. And this includes that they forget to care for their pet bird and the bird dies. and Marmee's just like, well, that's what happens. I really respected that. I don't think I would have the temerity as a parent to let this happen, but one does wonder.

1:06:23One of the reasons we do not have pets in my household is because I would be tempted to be like, I'm sorry, you didn't feed the cat for six weeks.

1:06:29Jeff:Oh my God, Jeff, no. Butterscotch ate it today. She's gone. That is the sound of you going onto the SPCA watch list. No, I'm not. That's what I'm saying. You keep chips out of the house because you know you're going to eat them. You hear what I'm saying? We got to get off of this one to save your reputation. Let's talk about notable quotes. Do parents talk to their kids about how to choose partners like this today? I think this is an unbelievable question. And I've got some parenting stuff going on a little bit later. But why don't you take this one for a second? I wondered this a lot because the parents, especially Marmee, talk so much with the girls about what to look for in a husband.

1:07:04Jeff:And like, yes, money is nice, but it's OK if you start off poor with someone who is a good person. and be good partners with each other. They're like, I do think Marmee gets it wrong. Sometimes there is a moment where Meg has had a fight with her husband because she's been like toiling away in the kitchen all day. And he brings home a dinner guest unannounced. And she has just, she loses her shit. And he's like, could you just exert yourself a little and like rustle up some grub for us? And Marmee tells her it's her fault and that she has neglected her husband because she's caring for twins and she needs to make the house so pleasant that he won't want to leave.

1:07:45And I was like, you failed us on that one. I think a more modern version of this would be for young parents that you need a date night. Like you need to make some time for yourself, but it shouldn't all be on Meg's platter. And John does a good job a little bit later, which I'm going to talk about. He does.

1:08:00Jeff:They catch up and they figure it out. But I just did wonder this. Like, I guess, I mean, marriage is much more optional now for most middle class people than it was in 1868. But I just wondered, like, how do parents talk with their kids? Are parents talking with kids in their teens and about like what you're looking for in a partner? I suppose they are, but it's so direct here. I mean, I think and I'll speak for my own sort of little part of culture, whatever, however you want to define that. I don't think it's specific, but there is much more discourse amongst the people I know about dating and being in a relationship with people about they need to respect you.

1:08:38You need to protect yourself. Like, you know, you get to be you. And I think there's a lot of that here. I think what's interesting about this book, The March Parents, and again, I have to imagine it was super unusual for the time, is they were encouraging their daughters to think about love, to think about partnership in a family. But also, it was okay if they just decided not to. They keep saying, I'd rather have a loving, happy daughter than an unhappy married person. Essentially, they don't quite say it in those terms. You can be a happy spinster. big shouts to spinsters from Alcott, which I guess would make sense.

1:09:15We're moving on to notable quotes here. I invented a subsection, which is, if there is someone out there with a little woman tattoo, I bet is one of the following four. And then I want you to tell me which one do you think is most likely and or were you, had you to get a little woman tattoo, which one of these would you get? Because you, you're much more tattoo friendly than I am. So this is not, this is not outside the realm of possibility here yes i have one literary tattoo but we're not there yet we're not we don't have to talk there yet okay ready first one i want to be great or nothing so this is when amy is really like being hardcore about she relatable i have to say she goes to rome and she's like oh this is what really being good at something looks like um and so she's despondent there I hate fuss and feathers.

1:10:02So this is Lori talking to Meg where she, I don't know that she is the subject of a prank, but the subject of real condescension in the form of her attire at a party. And it is an interesting cutting that Alcott does where Lori's sensibility about what he values about them is not that there's some lesser version of higher status people. Like seeing her all dolled up, he's like, oh, you really, I just hate fuss and feathers. I love that phrase, fuss and feathers. I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship. Pretty good. And the last one is settle your wig. And that's just calm down.

1:10:42Jeff:I mean, I feel like you put settle your wig on this list just because you knew that's the one that I would pick. I didn't. I think it's the funniest one. And I wasn't sure. Is Joe wearing a wig after she cuts her hair off? Is this a literal or is this a figure of speech? I read it as a figure of speech. I did too. Maybe it's literal. I Googled just to see what Louisa May Alcott tattoos people have. And indeed, I Want to Be Great or Nothing is on a Pinterest board out there in the world. I would get Settle Your Wig. One of my girlfriends and I refer to that Miranda Lambert song about Fix Your Makeup Girl.

1:11:17Jeff:And that's Fix Your Makeup, Deal With It. I think Settle Your Wig is in that same zone. Just like get on with it, take care of business. Do you think that people who got the I Want to Be Greater Nothing tattoo know that Amy March fails as a painter? No. The grand tradition of literary tattoos is that they have to be decontextualized. I actually think having a tattoo from a book is inversely correlated to you having read the book. That's a hot take for everyone out there right now. Oh, really funny. The other notable quote, Alcott describes Marmee as a stout motherly lady with a can I help you look about her.

1:11:56Jeff:And I just love that. That's amazing. Can I help you look? When you feel discontented, think over your blessings and be grateful. Like Alcott is giving the girls this lesson, but kind of the original gratitude journaler in a lot of ways. At one point, one of the girls mispronounces something and says, it's only a lapse of Linky. I was like, this is a lapse of Lingi is going to be my new term for brain fog. Like, I get the word wrong. Just a lapse of Lingi. Yeah. Senior moment, but for tweens. Yeah. I have a whole separate document I didn't even put in here that I'm trying to pick and choose from.

1:12:36Let's see here. So at one point, Jo is writing and she gets some feedback that say humor and pathos make it alive. and you have found your style at last. So this is a tragicomedy. And I don't know the history of that term, but it made me wonder, when did we start getting the idea of tragicomedy? We get a lot of mentions where if we were in a book, X would have happened, but we are not. So Y happened, but we are in a book. Like we get a little meta vertigo here. So here's one quote. Now, if she'd been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly.

1:13:12But you see, Jo wasn't a heroine. She was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she acted out her nature being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested. So even in the text, it's pointed out that Jo's not like other girls, but like in the real original way, which is really crazy to think about. Actually, here's the one I would get a tattoo of.

1:13:34Jeff:For to be independent and earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart. That's too long. I mean, you can't do that. You can't have punctuation. It's just O 'Neill's rules of tattoo conviction. Listen, I have punctuation in my last name, and I know what a millstone it is. Don't do that to your corporeal. It's true. That apostrophe is an albatross for you. It's horrible. Let's see. Here we go. So John, Brooke, and Meg's dust up. I have a couple of quotes here. So at one point, did John, Brooke, invent cry-it-out parenting? because Meg has no idea what to do with Demi, who seems like the worst kid that's ever existed.

1:14:20And also we need to work on the kids' dialect. Like that, I don't know what those kids are saying. I don't even know what she's trying to get them to say. And they're like, kids speak, that's come a long way.

1:14:28Jeff:I could do without the kids on the page personally. Yeah, it was, but like, so John and Meg's like, you got to keep him and shush him. He's keeping, he's like, I'm going to sit here until that kid cries and he falls asleep and it works. And Meg's like, oh my God. And then he comes out. And so once Meg has made these overtures, he thinks to herself, she is trying to like politics for my sake. So I'll try and like millinery for hers. That's only fair. That seems super unusual in 1868 where the man in a relationship would be like, I want to have an equal relationship. And this is something that the March adults model for them.

1:15:03It's like there's a give and take here. It's not all me and your service to me. I'm going to take an interest, not because I care about millinery, but I care about caring about you. And this is how I'm going to show up for this.

1:15:13Jeff:I thought that was really cool. Esther Perel is out there making millions of dollars teaching people to do this right now. Take an interest in the things your partner is interested in. Oh, I did find it. Go ahead. Yes, go ahead. My actual tattoo from this is Hope and Keep Busy. That's the one. That's the one I would get. Hope and Keep Busy. I do like that. Apparently, we've having this dynamic amongst relationships of all stripes, at least for 150 years. She would not ask him to stay home, but felt injured because he did not know that she wanted without being told, entirely forgetting the many evenings he had waited for her in vain.

1:15:48Jeff:I also love, I almost wish I hadn't any conscience. It's so inconvenient. That is terrific. This is Beth. Somehow she knows she's going to die, which is also just horrible. Go with it. She says to Joe, I'm not afraid, but it seems as if I should be homesick for you even in heaven. Rebecca, what is that? Come on, Louisa May. You can't do that to us. It's, I mean, really tugs at the heartstrings. Thanks. We talked about Fitzgerald being especially good at trying to capture the unspoken things between people. And this is mostly a dialogue book, which is one reason the adaptations for this are generally wonderful.

1:16:27But we do get a few moments. So here's another one. This is between Laurie, excuse me, between Joe and Beth, when, you know, they both know that they both know about what's going to happen to Beth. They did not feel it, yet neither spoke of it. For often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us, there exists a reserve which is very hard to overcome. Jo felt as if a veil had fallen between her heart and Beth's. But when she put out her hand to lift it up, there seemed something sacred in the silence and waited for Beth to speak. Like, you know, you have a fight. Why can't you say something?

1:16:59Like, there's like a weight there. Like, that's a really good encapsulation of that. This is Jo. This is the best encapsulation of her in the earlier parts. I'm as happy as I am, and I love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man. I guess the divine maybe you should consider, but any mortal man, we got no shot. there. Anything else you want to do? I don't think she's terribly interested in the divine either.

1:17:19Jeff:Yeah, no, this is eminently quotable. We could be here all day. All right. How do we know if it's for you?

1:17:30If you like a warm read that still has stakes, like you don't know that everything is going to be okay and it isn't, but it also kind of is, right, ultimately. Yeah, I think that you're going to enjoy this. If you like fun dialogue, I think if you like the historical elements. To try to read this through the eyes of a contemporary 1868 is a fascinating experiment. Yeah, how would this have landed in its day? Yeah, intellectual distance. Maybe not, Rebecca?

1:17:58Jeff:Yeah, not for you if you're looking for something that resonates line for line with contemporary feminism. Or if you, I like this note that you have, if you can only read with an adult's eyes and not at least to some degree with a child's heart. The book was written for girls, and that's important. You can pick it up as an adult, but trying to bring something childlike and fresh and open, there's a real openness and kind of a wonder to it. Yeah. The immortal questions that Art asks, here are the questions that we have used to structure some of this, thinking about the big questions that these books tend to be concerned with.

1:18:36Here are the candidates. What is the good life? What do I know my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil?

1:18:49Jeff:I mean, Alcott hits on all of these, but this is really concerned with what is the good life. I think that's the number one. Also with What Do I Owe My Neighbor, but as a subset of how you build the good life, a little bit with how do you deal with the certainty of death, but that comes back to what is the good life, living in a way that you can deal with the certainty of death. There's a little bit about bad people or good and evil and why we do difficult things, but largely this is a book about what is a good life and what does it mean to be a good person. I think that's one thing that's different about books like this.

1:19:25And I don't know if it's because it's for kids or the Alcott-ness or whatever, but in a lot of the great works that we talk about, these questions are posed differently or they're investigating the questions. I think here they're kind of answered, right? That's why it's a moral instruction book. It's instructive. To be productive and care about people and try to self-improve and, you know, find some space for yourself within the structure. Like, we're given answers and modeled. There's not, like, a big hanging thing. Even best, it's like, we're all going to die. There is a heaven. Like, there is no question about what happens, really, about after death is sort of lightly put there.

1:19:58There's actually no question about what to deal with good and evil. Evil is there in sort of the Christian sense. But it's pragmatic dealing, not, like, what's the deal with it? It's like, this is how you get through it. Yeah.

1:20:10Jeff:And I think because Alcott is so warm and so open and like the parents are nonjudgmental about the kids. And so you get the vibe that Alcott is also nonjudgmental. The moral instruction here works in a way that is really hard to pull off. Like she doesn't feel preachy to me, but there's a real grounded quality to it. This was too easy. Are we sure this is about art and writing? Like absolutely a thousand percent. Absolutely about art and writing. And especially with Joe as an avatar for Alcott, a hundred million percent. Both the artistic, both as a pursuit, but as a way of being, as a way of like finding a way to be in the world that gives you some.

1:20:48I mean, I think that's one thing art can provide for people intellectually. But art and writing, many of the arts have also provided alternate ways of being in the world because it doesn't neatly fall into sort of commercial industrial complex stuff. Like it doesn't follow patterns. It can't be mass produced, at least not yet. And it can provide a pressure release valve with consequences. And it's by no means guaranteed, but it can present other ways of being and thinking in the world. That's what literature's metaphor. This is where I try to pick out one either overt metaphor or something in the book that I think is interesting to think about for its own.

1:21:21I love their quote unquote post office that they build where it's this little. It's almost like a little free library kind of looking thing is how I imagine it, where they send notes to from each other. Like, yeah, out on the hedge outside of. So I think this is a pretty good encapsulation of this amongst and between finding space amongst. There's the real post office that you can use for official business. But you also create your own little post office where you can send notes. You can have private communications. You can be silly and fun and create your own identity. And I just love that idea of their own post office.

1:21:53Very sweet there. Could you get most of the gist of this from watching the Signal adaptation? Have you seen this one, the 2018? I have not.

1:22:00Jeff:I was hoping to have time to watch the Gerwig one. That's fine. I just didn't want to throw it to you. I have not. I haven't seen either of the primary adaptations of this. I think so. I think the 2019 version is especially good. I do recommend it. I know a lot of people have the affection for the 1994 version, which I saw at absolutely the wrong time as a 17-year-old. Oh, boy. So, I mean, I didn't hate it. I was like, okay, that's fine. But 2019, I watched it with my kids. Both my kids loved it. And it's about as, quote, unquote, up to date as can be easily expected without slipping into sort of moral anachronism.

1:22:33If anybody can do that, it's Gerwig.

1:22:35Jeff:And we're going to see her do it again with Lionel and the Wardrobe. I am super interested. Like we're getting more and she's like increasingly difficult Christian allegories. It's a Gerwig's adaptation. Fascinating. A fascinating career unfolding. And one of the reasons it's so lends itself to adaptation because it's so talky and dialogue is probably of the things that happen in books. The easiest thing to represent on screen. Intuity is the hardest one. There's not as much of that. I think you would get less of Alcott's witty asides about how in the normal stories you just don't get that kind of a stuff.

1:23:04Sure.

1:23:04Jeff:But yeah, you can voice over with it, but it's not you don't need it. Yeah. Okay. Every kind of adaptation has been made of this. There's been multiple operas. There's been TV series. There's been musicals. There's movies. So we're only left with Muppets. So in a Muppet version of this, how would you handle this? I want to gender bend this a little bit and have Animal be Joe. So just completely inarticulate rager. Just rocking out. We get so much from Joe about wishing that she could be a boy. In the 1868 expression of it, I read that as really wishing that she weren't constrained by all the trappings of femininity.

1:23:43Jeff:I don't think this is a story about gender dysphoria, but Muppet Animal is just like so wild and so free. And there is, I think, like this level of play and chaos that Joe could access if you really let her go. So that would be my that's my Muppet casting. Yeah, we have we have a casting problem with the Muppets. We don't have enough lady Muppets. We've got like Janice and Piggy and then maybe the chickens and I'm out. Like, I don't even know who else I've got. And the internet has not yet recovered from the mental image of Miss Piggy karate chopping bunny off the cliff in The Secret History. So we're putting Miss Piggy on the shelf for a little bit.

1:24:21Miscellany. Trivia adaptations, rumors, misretributed quotes, etc.

1:24:25Jeff:Much like You're So Vain, there were a ton of rumors about who Laurie was based on, including mentions that maybe it was Henry David Thoreau or maybe it was Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian. But the best clue that we have is that on a trip in 1865 to Europe, Louisa May Alcott met a Polish musician named Ladislav Wisniewski. I'm sure I'm butchering that. You're doing the best you can. I'm trying. And she nicknamed him Laddie. They ended up spending two weeks together alone in Paris. What? Which that alone is a big, like, cal surprise for an unmarried woman. And Harriet Reeson, who wrote a biography of Alcott, contends that Laurie was based on Laddie.

1:25:07Jeff:which the names alone are an interesting clue. Yeah, you don't have to do sort of JFK assassination level conspiracies to jump over there. To get there. Hot takes. You have an unbelievable one. Little Women is actually a book about how most mainstream fiction is bad. Incredible. You've got evidence here. You've got receipts, Rebecca. Do it. There are so many quotes. That class of light literature in which the passions have a holiday, And when the author's invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the stage of one half the dramatis personae, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall.

1:25:41Jeff:Then later, sorry you could find nothing better to read. I write that rubbish because it sells and ordinary people like it. Like, Alcott is negging her own readers. I think she is. I think she's a little bit, oh, reader. Yeah. I see you. Then in like, for in those dark ages, even all perfect America read rubbish. I mean, that's probably the most portable quote. Yeah. All Perfect Americas and Reads Rubbish. Yes. And then, you know, Joe's publisher saying, tell her to make it short and spicy and never mind the moral. Incredible. Just the entire publishing industry and the reading public just taking major hits, like one after the next from Alcott here.

1:26:18Jeff:Also, middle-aged women took a lot of strays in Little Women. Alcott was trying to hold some space. Like there's like two lengthy defenses of unmarried women. And still it's tough. I think she maybe realized it was kind of difficult. They're like overt descriptions of Marmee as like saggy and gray by the time she's like 40. I don't think Marmee was doing a lot of self-care. I don't think she had a regimen. Yeah. But my real hottest hot take here is that this is a book about how most mainstream fiction is bad. Yeah. I already did mine about the saddest and how John Brooke invented crying it out.

1:26:55Further reading. There's a bunch here. So much. Where do you want to go? I've got a couple. Why don't you lead off?

1:27:01Jeff:You can read Alcott's sequels to Little Women. Little Men is one. Joe's Boys is the next. Joyce Carol Oates wrote A Bloodsmore Romance, which was inspired by Little Women. March by Geraldine Brooks is a retelling from the father's perspective. Which is good. I read a long time ago, and that's all I remember is that I really liked it. Ask me no further questions at this time, but I remember liking it. Less well-known, but on the same tip, is Marmee by Sarah Miller, which does the POV flip and tells the story from mom's perspective. And then in my research, I came across More to the Story by Hina Khan, which is a middle grade retelling about sisters in a Muslim family.

1:27:38Jeff:Then if you want the nonfiction, more exploratory, like lit crit side of things, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters by Anne Boyd is a collection of essays that ties little women to all kinds of contemporary works, including Gilmore Girls and Sex and the City, which we've already mentioned here today. I think, I mean, these two have been yoked really since they both existed, but Anne of Green Gables is a similar, you know, interesting, headstrong girl taking her life and concern seriously. This isn't structurally similar, but I think you're dumped into a warm mess of a family who you find affection for.

1:28:19It's a good pick. There's a series called The Vanderbakers of 141st Street by Karina Jan Glazer. it follows a family mixed race family in Harlem set in contemporary times it's a middle grade to maybe upper middle grade book it gets older as the series goes I don't want to spoil anything here but like bad things happen like things happen much like they happen in Little Women and in Reading Aloud to My Family or we were listening to the audiobook I guess there's one moment we're all crying and that's part of it it has the sunshine and shadow but presented in a really fun way and they get up to mischief and the parents are, they're available and they're agents, but they're not centered.

1:28:57They're kind of like they're playing goalie to keep anything really bad from happening. But other than that, you know, they're kind of left to kill the bird.

1:29:04Jeff:That series has been really important to your family. It's been extremely important to my family. Their cocktail party crib sheet, three to five takeaways. I have, Alcott was a real one. Abolitionist, advocate for women's suffrage and fiercely independent. Yeah. I said this near the top of the show, but she was a real hero for refusing to get Joe and Laurie together and defying her publisher there. And also really genius in her ability to deliver on a girl's story that both presents the kinds of lessons about how to, quote, conquer themselves that her publisher wanted her to tell and also provides instruction in subverting those expectations at the same time.

1:29:40Did we I don't know we mentioned this, but maybe here if I did, I'm sorry for the repetition. Neither she nor her publisher had a lot of hope for the story, Little Women, the first volume. But then they gave it to nieces and other girls in their milieu, and they loved it. So there was like, did they invent focus groups, Rebecca? Is this something that happened?

1:30:00Jeff:I wouldn't put it past Louise May. I'll go. Early beta readers. Beta readers. Final beat, a zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to ten, with ten being the highest. We evaluate according to these vectors, historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor. This is a super hard one. I was looking at this and like, we'll just have to take it. I mean, nine? Like, how are we doing this? I think it's a nine. Both for itself and for how much work and other future writers for generations it inspired. It's a nine. Now, readability, depending on how we, this is a 10 because it's not hard at all to read.

1:30:38I think I would demerit it that the second volume is shaggy. I think I would take a point off of that.

1:30:44Jeff:She wrote it really quickly, too. She didn't want to write it. She got it out, just cranked it out. It is a little shaggy, but it's super readable. It's easy. So there's a part where it drags. So I keep it from being like, I was talking about reading The Murder on the Orient Express the other day. Like, that's a 10. But this is an 8.5 or a 9 just because of the length. Again, that's kind of an artifact of it being in two volumes. But that's what we have now. So there we go. Current relevance of central questions. I think in a micro way, it's low, but in a macro way, it's super high. Yeah, I think really a 9 or a 10.

1:31:13Jeff:Like, what does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to be in community? How do you find the compromise between self-sacrifice and going after what you want? What should we look for in partners? What does it mean to be unconventional? Like, sort of being willing to go against the tide and take the consequences of that. There's a lot going on here. I might bump it down to a seven or eight just because it doesn't have central question. It has answers. And I tend not to like that as much. I can live with an ape on this. Book nerd read cred is pretty low. Not because of anything. Well, I guess because it's a kid's book.

1:31:52Read cred is not what we think. It's kind of what you get from the open world, I don't think.

1:31:56Jeff:Although, to the flip, like in my career in publishing, when I have mentioned to people that I like haven't really read Little Women as an adult or I don't really remember having read it as a kid, they're like, oh, my God, you have to read Little Women. So you get no points but a demerit if you haven't read it. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. So I think it's, I would give this like a six, like to tip it past the halfway point. Yeah. Oh, damn factor. This one's tough, too. I think there is not a... Outside of Marmee saying that thing about the anger, I wasn't surprised once. Now, I have read it and it's out there.

1:32:35But in terms of like, whoa, look at her go, it doesn't really do that. And I think that's what we're trying to capture with the O'Dam factor here.

1:32:41Jeff:And it's also not like... Often the O'Dam factor comes from the beauty of the writing. Yeah. And this is not a book about... Which is what we look for, I think. This is our scoring. This is not a book about that at all. And Alcott knew it. Like, again, she's negging people for buying this kind of book. So I think like a three. Three. I think that's fair. Anything else, Rebecca? I think we did it. That was fun. We did do it. It was fun. I'm glad to - Was it better or worse than you were expecting? It was better. I wondered. I don't want to make you say that at the top of the show when people were asking people to listen for 90 minutes that you hated reading it.

1:33:12Jeff:No, I enjoyed it. I'm glad to have this in my adult reading belt now. Yeah. It was good. I think the reading, but also you need to get the side dish here of the stuff about Alcott and everything else in the publishing. I do think that really shaped it for me, that if I had just picked up a copy that was just the text and I hadn't gotten that Showalter introduction. And you just raw dog little women. Yeah, like here's why the feminists care about Alcott was helpful for me, that grounding in historical importance. You can find show notes. Actually, we don't want you to go there anymore. We want to go to the Patreon.

1:33:45What's the Patreon again?

1:33:46Jeff:Patreon.com slash Zero to Well Read. You can also email us at Zero to Well Read at BookRiot.com. Happy New Year, everyone out there. Zero to Well Read is produced by you and I, you and me, Jeff O 'Neill and Rebecca Shinsky. Thanks to Caitlin Brim for editing and Vanessa Diaz for editorial support. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. And we're going to be back next week and several more weeks in a row of talking about books. Rebecca, a pleasure and a joy. Have a good one.

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