Bich Minh Nguyen

When I was a kid, I sometimes read Little Women as a kind of fantasy-fulfillment. The Marches were the picture of an ideal American family, with their cozy fireplace and earnest lessons and kindly neighbors. It was all so wonderful that I became resentful. They were relentlessly moral, I grumbled, and Marmee relentlessly wise. Plus, they wouldn’t even serve champagne at Meg’s wedding. I would come away from the book feeling either reverent or rebellious. Yet I always returned. I may have been drawn to the descriptions of blanc-mange and lobster salad, sure, but I also began to understand that these “little women” were doing what they could to protect themselves against the world outside—the troubling realities of wartime and poverty, vanity and unrest. Maybe that’s why one of my favorite chapters in the book is the second one. It’s Christmas, Mr. March is away in the war, and the girls have contrived pretty gifts for Marmee. They look forward to a breakfast of cream and muffins, but end up giving it all to a poor German family. Then the girls lark about, putting on a play, and find an unexpected treat: bon-bons, cake, fruit, ice cream, and flowers, sent over by Mr. Laurence next door. The chapter ends with Beth saying, “I’m afraid [father] isn’t having such a merry Christmas as we are.” Such worry and danger are hardly ever admitted into the household, but as a reader, I clung to them. They made the Marches seem less of an impenetrable fairy tale and more of a real family.

P.S. Geraldine Brooks’ stunning Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March imagines Mr. March’s story, from his courtship of Marmee to his devastating experiences as a Union chaplain in the Civil War.