Shealy, Daniel, editor. Little Women at 150

Little Women at 150, edited by Daniel Shealy, features eight critical essays that consider Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Little Women. Although the essays are not unified by a particular theme or approach, they are all written by “scholars whose research and writings over the past twenty years have helped elevate Alcott’s reputation in the academic community” (Shealy 11). The collection’s well-researched range of topics offers readers a deep and multifaceted dive into Alcott’s text, to march right alongside the sisters toward a more mature grasp of their world, as well as the one outside the book. Shealy’s introduction opens with the image of a nostalgic Julian Hawthorne. Julian – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Louisa May Alcott’s friend, and the figure who once claimed to be the inspiration for Laurie – reminisces about the then 50-year-old story of the March sisters, having recently watched a film adaptation which drew in vast crowds and profits (Shealy 3–4). He credits it all to Alcott’s storytelling. Readers who pick up this collection likely feel a degree of nostalgia for Little Women, as well, and opening the book with a Laurie figure reminiscing over Little Women evokes a meta whirlpool of nostalgia, the emotion which the novel’s plot and characters themselves evoke and grapple with. Through such an opening, Shealy effortlessly pulls on the threads which carry the many levels of Little Women’s enduring success. 50 years after its publication, when Julian writes about watching the moving picture, the novel remains popular and influential for its themes and characters, which connect with readers and audiences on both a personal and sociocultural level. The same is true at 150 years, and these threads introduced by Shealy weave through the entire collection. Little Women lives on in print, in countless stage and screen adaptations, and in the hearts of admirers – young and old – worldwide, with Shealy conjecturing the number of sales over the past 150 years to be “in the millions” (8). Although, in academic circles, Alcott was not taken seriously until the mid–twentieth century with the emergence of feminism, Shealy’s diverse collection illustrates the many avenues of scholarly discourse that Little Women offers, connecting the text to other great writers, philosophers, and social, cultural, and historical movements. With its exploration of mature and complicated topics, this collection continues the movement away from “the view of Louisa May as ‘the children’s friend,’” and places her voice in conversation with leading social, historical, and literary figures (Shealy 11). The first essay, “Class, Charity, and Coming of Age in Little Women” by John Matteson, puts Alcott into a critical conversation about class and the responsibility of charity alongside John Winthrop and Friedrich Engels. Matteson writes that “Marmee uses charity to reassert her individual and social worth,” asserting that Alcott’s character reveals a weakness in Engels’s theory of domestic enslavement, which does not consider the value of charity work that “brings relief to the recipient and happiness to the donor . . . [and] benefits the economy, giving to the indigent the means that they might use to better their lives” (28). In this way, Matteson asserts that Alcott offers charity work as a counterbalancing social vision, boosting the significance of her children’s novel into a discourse of social structure. Roberta Seelinger Trites’s essay, “Louisa May Alcott’s Emersonian Use of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Little Women as Palimpsest,” then places Alcott’s voice as engaging with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, one WOMEN’S STUDIES 2023, VOL. 52, NO. 5, 603–605