Little Women week 6

Chapters 24 to 27 February 17th to February 23

Hello Readers!

This week: Read chapter 24 (Gossip!) to 27 (Literary Lessons). This is maybe one of my favorite sections in the book. We get a wedding - a tear jerker, as you would imagine - and then we get to follow Meg, Amy, and Jo for a chapter each, as they test their wings and experiment with living out their “Castles in the Air”. Meg has some Domestic experiments, Amy some artistic ones, and Jo some literary ones.

Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, and Emma Watson in Little Women (Sony Pictures).

If you have the annotated edition from Owl’s Nest, it’s worth reading in the introduction about the literary influence of Bildungsroman on Part Two. Basically, this is a type of story the German Romantics popularized, where the main characters have to grow up and enter adulthood. Usually their passage to adulthood is marked by grief, or falling in love, or connecting to society rather than just to themselves as individuals. There’s also a subcategory of this type of novel which looks specifically at artists — how do young artists grow up into great artists? Alcott plays with both of these ideas in this second half of the book.

I hope you enjoy watching these characters develop into young adults!