![]() ![]() These characters are not glamorous, and the events are mostly not of great moment. Jo catches him spying on them, and befriends him. Next door live a rich old man and his orphaned grandson, Laurie, who, when he is home from his Swiss boarding school, lurks behind the curtains to get a look at what the March sisters are up to. Their mother, whom they call Marmee, is with them, and the girls are always nuzzling up to her chair in order to draw on her bottomless fund of loving counsel. The girls’ father is away from home, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. ![]() Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of the family, and cute, so everybody loves her anyway. ![]() She collects cast-off dolls-dolls with no arms, dolls with their stuffing coming out-and nurses them in her doll hospital. Next comes Beth, thirteen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and doomed to die young. Jo writes plays that the girls perform, with false mustaches and paper swords, in the parlor. Then comes Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo: bookish and boyish, loud and wild. The eldest is Meg, beautiful, maternal, and mild. ![]() It is doubtful whether any novel has been more important to America’s female writers than Louisa May Alcott’s “ Little Women,” the story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the eighteen-sixties. ![]()
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