Review of The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark

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).