LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ Marmee (mother), Anna and May approve my plan, so I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, excepting sisters; our queer ways and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.
– from her diary, in
THE NATION
Miss Alcott’s new juvenile is an agreeable little story, which is not only very well adapted to the readers for whom it is especially intended, but may also be read with pleasure by older people. The girls depicted all belong to healthy types, and are drawn with a certain cleverness, although there is in the book a lack of what painters call atmosphere – things and people being painted too much in “local colors,” and remaining, under all circumstances, somewhat too persistently themselves.
– from a review of
HENRY JAMES
It is sometimes affirmed by the observant foreigner, on visiting these shores, and indeed by the venturesome native, when experience has given him the power of invidious comparison, that American children are without a certain charm usually possessed by the youngsters of the Old World. The little girls are apt to be pert and shrill, the little boys to be aggressive and knowing; both the girls and boys are accused of lacking, or of having lost, the sweet, shy bloom of ideal infancy. If this is so, the philosophic mind desires to know the reason of it, and when in the course of its enquiry the philosophic mind encounters the tales of Miss Alcott, we think it will feel a momentary impulse to cry Eureka! Miss Alcott is the novelist of children – the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room. She deals with the social questions of the child-world, and, like Thackeray and Trollope, she is a satirist. She is extremely clever, and, we believe, vastly popular with infant readers.
– from an unsigned article in the Nation (October 14, 1875)
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
The career of Miss Alcott has not only given pleasure to many readers, and real benefit to not a few, but it has afforded an example of what may be accomplished by talent and industry in the way of worldly success, and this of rather a high kind. She fulfilled that which is to-day the dearest dream of so many young women. Earning her living first by domestic service, she soon passed beyond that; by her own unaided pen she lifted an exceedingly impecunious household into lifelong independence and comfort; and she nursed, in what was for him luxury, the extreme old age of a father whose ideal and unworldly nature had made it very hard for him to afford ordinary comforts and advantages to her youth. This she did without tricks or meanness or self-puffing; without feeling jealousy, or inspiring antagonism. She had the delight of sending sunshine into a myriad of scattered homes, and of teaching many young girls, doubtless, the way to a more generous and noble life.
– from Short Studies of American
Authors (1888)
LUCY C. LILLIE
