Review of The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark
Name
GubarClarkReview.pdf
Size
95.34 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5892f83f71818218d4472b63b47df7d6
Author(s)
Gubar, Marah
Date Issued
2016
Journal
Children's Literature
Publisher
John Hopkins University Press
Citation
Gubar, Marah. "Review of The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark." Children's Literature 44 (2016): 244-250 © 2017 Project MUSE.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In 1871, a young girl fleeing the Chicago fire saves a single item from the flames: a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. More than a century later, another young girl pays homage to this beloved text by composing the Louisa May Alcott Cookbook (1985), a selection of recipes for foods mentioned in Little Women, published in the year its nine-year-old author turns twelve. In between these two events, Alcott’s head is featured on a five-cent stamp, a ship is named after her, and a quartet of chimps at the Bronx Zoo is christened Amy, Beth, Jo, and Meg in honor of Little Women’s central characters—not once, not twice, but three times between 1952 and 1960. Meanwhile, a couple of overzealous translators, not content merely to convert Alcott’s most famous story into French and Dutch, revise the ending to make it conclude just as many fans (then and now) wish it would: Jo marries Laurie, not that old fuddy-duddy Professor Bhaer (who, by the way, was played by William Shatner in the 1978 television version of Little Women).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Humanities. Literature Section
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619585
