Four sisters, four writers – with the segments going in age order from Meg on down to Amy. The corresponding authors are Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado and Jane Smiley. Each essay is as different as were the four March sisters, and each is satisfying to some degree, or not.
Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, and an accomplished journalist, writes about the episode in which Meg goes off for a visit with prosperous friends, but feels insecure and self-conscious about her modest circumstances. Having no suitable clothes of her own and craving the beauty and glamour the right gown will give her, she is lent a dress, shoes, and attends a dance looking quite unlike herself. Laurie sees her in her finery and clearly disapproves. Meg is quite stung and embarrassed by the criticism but gets through the evening champagne in hand.
Bolick relates a similar event early in her working life in which she too is lent a glamorous dress for a special event. She is accompanied by a critical male colleague who makes her feel even more uncomfortable, and the evening changes the balance in their relationship. Years later she looks back and makes peace with her younger self. How we see ourselves, and our unease with how we fit in is a source of great anxiety for many women, and it is often played out in our obsession with having the right clothes. It's a good essay, and the analogy is solid.
Zhang, a prize-winning poet and essayist, tackles Jo. Zhang immigrated to the United States as a young child. She aspired to be a writer who is a bold, brave girl, as opposed to a woman, because she perceived the role of women as dutiful, subservient and lacking independence. Zhang's parents wanted her to pursue a profession that would make her successful, but in a safe way – not as a writer. Zhang resisted reading Little Women, because she imagined the March girls as delicate flowers, but when she finally read the book later on as a pre-teen with ideas about romance and femininity, she was offended by Jo's behavior. Zhang was critical of Jo's non-traditional behavior much like the way Zhang's mother criticized her for wanting to pursue writing career.
We all know the passage in which Jo seeks help from her mother, Marmee, in controlling her temper when Marmee confides her own anger. Zhang had also observed her own mother's hidden anger over her thwarted ambitions – in public settings, her mother was a model of generosity, solicitousness and kindness, but in the privacy of home she lashed out at her husband and daughter.
Zhang examines Jo's character throughout the book and has researched the Alcott family. There are many known parallels between them and the Marches of Little Women, and she reveals some further information about the Alcotts and draws some of her own conclusions about them. She also shares more about her own family relationships now that she is a grown woman, but she concludes that she is uncertain of them, as well as her view of Jo and about Little Women. Perhaps in time, with age, she will look upon it all with the greater clarity of distance and maturity.
Carmen Maria Machado is an acclaimed essayist and critic who writes about Beth's illness and decline, but also about her own illnesses in childhood and forward. In fact, much of her essay is more about her own life discoveries, but against the background of Little Women and the Alcott family.
Lizzie was the real-life Alcott sister who died young, passing away at twenty-two after several years of illness. There was great grief in the family, as would have been expected. Having not had the opportunity to create accomplishments like her sisters Louisa or May (the model for Amy), perhaps there was not so much to say about her, other than that she was kind and gentle, "a dear". Her counterpart, Beth, is much the same, though in Little Women, her music is strongly presented as her gift. She is perhaps the most difficult to portray as she is the most enigmatic. But, there is too much emphasis on the essay's author, rather than on the character of Beth.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley wraps it up with her essay about Amy. Through the decades, she was often looked upon as the least appealing of the sisters, the spoiled youngest daughter who burns Jo's novel, and ultimately captures the heart of Laurie. Most readers idolized Jo, the center of the book, and who is the most like Louisa May Alcott herself.
Smiley tells us that she grew to like Amy the best, and I have to agree. Amy has a talent for art and the ambition to pursue it. Unlike Jo, she is pragmatic, and practical in going about getting what she wants. She finds a balance. She becomes the companion to rich Aunt March, and accompanies her to Europe, where she can also get the art training she craves and absorbs the lessons of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Amy also recognizes that she lives in the man's world of her day, and that her options for independence are limited. Happily, she and Laurie fall in love, and she also continues to pursue her art.
Perhaps it is Smiley's more removed view of the book (she is by far the oldest of the four essayists), and that she is focused on Amy's character rather than on her own, or it could be the fluidity of her writing, but I found her section to be both the most interesting and illuminating. It is by far the most satisfying of the essays.
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