Good Wives

GOOD WIVES

Louisa May Alcott

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2016.

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

Cover by e-Digital Design

Cover image: Meg prepares for her wedding to John Brooke, in the gown she has made herself, M. V. Wheelhouse, 1911 © Mary Evans Picture Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008166731

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Version: 2015-12-04

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

About the Author

Louisa May Alcott was born into a family of American transcendentalists, the second of four daughters. Transcendentalism was essentially a movement initiated in reaction to a feeling that society was eroding its mores and was consequently in need of reform. Alcott was therefore immersed in an environment of progressive thinking and intellectualization during her formative years. This included a strong moral objection to the notion of slavery, which would become the lynchpin of the American Civil War (1861–5). The Alcotts hid a runaway slave in their house in 1847, such was their commitment to the cause.

During the war itself Alcott worked as a nurse and it was her experiences that served to hone her story-telling skill. It wasn’t until early middle age, however, that she became a success. In 1868 the first part of Little Women was published to great acclaim and her reputation grew from there. But her life was not a long one, and she died of ill health at the age of 55 in 1888.

Apart from the Little Women trilogy, she wrote many other novels and children’s stories, which are better known in the United States. Her writing style remained more or less similar to Little Women, because she was primarily interested in the comings and goings of people in her stories. They are the forerunner of the cast novels written by modern-day writers such as Maeve Binchy, where the stories are windows into many interrelated lives.

On a socio-political level, Alcott’s legacy is that she is held aloft as an early feminist and humanitarian. Her high intellect rendered her unable to resist the testing of conventions in her real life and in her literary alter-egos. She lived through the turbulence of the American Civil War and saw America metamorphose into a modern nation where slaves were freed of their literal chains and women were freed of their metaphorical chains. It was a dual emancipation and Alcott effectively documented the event in her prose.

Little Women

Published in its entirety in 1880, Little Women is a novel about an American family from a female perspective. Louisa May Alcott based the story on the formative years of herself and her three sisters. It is a novel that says a great deal about people and society without requiring a complex or sweeping plot to carry the reader along.

The primary theme is that siblings each have different personalities despite their having been brought up in the same family environment – nature versus nurture. Alcott gives each of the four sisters particular idiosyncrasies that signature their personalities and generate advantages and disadvantages for them. Thus they are each known for being vain, quick-tempered, coy or selfish. The novel is partly about the extent to which children live up to their ascribed personality traits once they are known for them, or rather are allotted them, as if parents need to compartmentalize their children’s characters.

Alcott was writing at a time when people held deeply Christian values, where the ideal person was the opposite of all of these traits: modest, level-headed, outgoing and giving. The idea was to pretend to be that ideal, albeit unattainable, synthesis. It was all about being virtuous and wholesome in the eyes of the Christian God, and also a good prospect as potential wife or husband material in the eyes of others who held the same views. Thus Alcott generally regards the traits of the March sisters as personality flaws, as opposed to strengths, and the four sisters struggle to overcome them rather than embrace them.

The title Little Women has been interpreted in two ways. Firstly, as an expression of the relative unimportance of women in comparison to men in 19th-century America. Secondly, the title is often read as a statement about the general lack of significance of most people in society. It seems likely that the title encompasses both meanings: i.e. that women, and especially those of mediocrity, possess a diminutive presence.

The Character of Josephine March

Alcott allegedly based the central character, Josephine March, on herself. She is the one with a furious temper, and acts as a device by which Alcott can vent her frustrations at the world’s unfairness to women. Like Alcott, Josephine is something of a tomboy and therefore cannot appreciate why society draws a distinction between the genders. As far as she is concerned, women can do anything men can do.

The author’s intention was to make Josephine the perpetual spinster due to her feminist views, but rather ironically, she ended up marrying her off to keep her readership happy, such was society’s desire to see her conform to norms. Josephine struggles throughout the book with the parameters of womanhood. She wishes to take up arms during the Civil War and she wishes to attend college, but both ambitions are denied to her. Most of all she is vexed by other people’s expectation of her to mellow her extreme views and find a protective husband. Inevitably this makes her ever more bristly. Little Women was followed by two sequel volumes that took the life of Josephine into middle age. She becomes the governess of a school where she finds her maternal instinct by teaching and caring for her charges.

In some ways the overall story demonstrates how a strong-willed personality can initially baulk at convention, but eventually capitulate once they realize that they are affecting no one but themselves. It’s likely in the modern world that Josephine would be described as ‘high maintenance’ for her initial efforts at resisting expectations, but instead of becoming the neurotic spinster, she finds a way to contain herself by using her teaching as a vehicle to express her views. Her husband, who runs the school with her, is able to tolerate her idiosyncrasies because he is an intellectual and finds her intelligence attractive.

Good Wives

Good Wives, the sequel to Little Women that begins three years after the first novel ends, was published in 1869, just a year after Little Women. The two are sometimes published together in a single volume, forming part of The Little Women Trilogy that also includes Jo’s Boys as its third title.

In Good Wives, Alcott describes the journey from adolescence to adulthood as experienced by the four March sisters. Despite their disparate personalities, she extolls the virtues of inherent goodness, kindness, tolerance and forgiveness – important Christian transcendentalist values. Alcott was also concerned with the compromise that women often had to make between pursuing their own ambitions and fulfilling their roles as daughters and wives. In many respects she was a pioneering feminist, communicating through her characters that ambition could be a female trait too. Hers was a pragmatic feminism, still ultimately valuing the love and contentment that marriage and family life bring above all else. Both Little Women and Good Wives are a complex web of relationships and in this regard read rather like an early soap opera, which would go some way to explaining the mass appeal and popularity of Alcott’s books.

The United States had different social and cultural concerns in the late-nineteenth century to those of Victorian England, since the nation had only recently recovered from a brutal civil war, where the libertarian values of the North had triumphed. Alcott was writing for an audience who were interested in the ethics and morals of the American population, and was among the vanguard of female writers from this time.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of Collins

Life & Times

Chapter 1: Gossip

Chapter 2: The First Wedding

Chapter 3: Artistic Attempts

Chapter 4: Literary Lessons

Chapter 5: Domestic Experiences

Chapter 6: Calls

Chapter 7: Consequences

Chapter 8: Our Foreign Correspondent

Chapter 9: Tender Troubles

Chapter 10: Jo’s Journal

Chapter 11: A Friend

Chapter 12: Heartache

Chapter 13: Beth’s Secret

Chapter 14: New Impressions

Chapter 15: On the Shelf

Chapter 16: Lazy Laurence

Chapter 17: The Valley of the Shadow

Chapter 18: Learning to Forget

Chapter 19: All Alone

Chapter 20: Surprises

Chapter 21: My Lord and Lady

Chapter 22: Daisy and Demi

Chapter 23: Under the Umbrella

Chapter 24: Harvest Time

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

Gossip

In order that we may start afresh, and go to Meg’s wedding with free minds, it will be well to begin with a little gossip about the Marches. And here let me premise, that if any of the elders think there is too much “lovering” in the story, as I fear they may (I’m not afraid the young folks will make that objection), I can only say with Mrs. March, “What can you expect when I have four gay girls in the house, and a dashing young neighbor over the way?”

The three years that have passed have brought but few changes to the quiet family. The war is over, and Mr. March safely at home, busy with his books and the small parish which found in him a minister by nature as by grace,—a quiet, studious man, rich in the wisdom that is better than learning, the charity which calls all mankind “brother,” the piety that blossoms into character, making it august and lovely.

These attributes, in spite of poverty and the strict integrity which shut him out from the more worldly successes, attracted to him many admirable persons, as naturally as sweet herbs draw bees, and as naturally he gave them the honey into which fifty years of hard experience had distilled no bitter drop. Earnest young men found the grayheaded scholar as young at heart as they; thoughtful or troubled women instinctively brought their doubts and sorrows to him, sure of finding the gentlest sympathy, the wisest counsel; sinners told their sins to the pure-hearted old man, and were both rebuked and saved; gifted men found a companion in him; ambitious men caught glimpses of nobler ambitions than their own; and even worldlings confessed that his beliefs were beautiful and true, although “they wouldn’t pay.”

To outsiders, the five energetic women seemed to rule the house, and so they did in many things; but the quiet scholar, sitting among his books, was still the head of the family, the household conscience, anchor, and comforter; for to him the busy, anxious women always turned in troublous times, finding him, in the truest sense of those sacred words, husband and father.

The girls gave their hearts into their mother’s keeping, their souls into their father’s; and to both parents, who lived and labored so faithfully for them, they gave a love that grew with their growth, and bound them tenderly together by the sweetest tie which blesses life and outlives death.

Mrs. March is as brisk and cheery, though rather grayer, than when we saw her last, and just now so absorbed in Meg’s affairs that the hospitals and homes, still full of wounded “boys” and soldiers’ widows, decidedly miss the motherly missionary’s visits.

John Brooke did his duty manfully for a year, got wounded, was sent home, and not allowed to return. He received no stars or bars, but he deserved them, for he cheerfully risked all he had; and life and love are very precious when both are in full bloom. Perfectly resigned to his discharge, he devoted himself to getting well, preparing for business, and earning a home for Meg. With the good sense and sturdy independence that characterized him, he refused Mr. Laurence’s more generous offers, and accepted the place of book-keeper feeling better satisfied to begin with an honestly-earned salary than by running any risks with borrowed money.

Meg had spent the time in working as well as waiting, growing womanly in character, wise in housewifely arts, and prettier than ever; for love is a great beautifier. She had her girlish ambitions and hopes, and felt some disappointment at the humble way in which the new life must begin. Ned Moffat had just married Sallie Gardiner, and Meg couldn’t help contrasting their fine house and carriage, many gifts, and splendid outfit, with her own, and secretly wishing she could have the same. But somehow envy and discontent soon vanished when she thought of all the patient love and labor John had put into the little home awaiting her; and when they sat together in the twilight, talking over their small plans, the future always grew so beautiful and bright that she forgot Sallie’s splendor, and felt herself the richest, happiest girl in Christendom.

Jo never went back to Aunt March, for the old lady took such a fancy to Amy that she bribed her with the offer of drawing lessons from one of the best teachers going; and for the sake of this advantage, Amy would have served a far harder mistress. So she gave her mornings to duty, her afternoons to pleasure, and prospered finely. Jo, meantime, devoted herself to literature and Beth, who remained delicate long after the fever was a thing of the past. Not an invalid exactly, but never again the rosy, healthy creature she had been; yet always hopeful, happy, and serene, busy with the quiet duties she loved, every one’s friend, and an angel in the house, long before those who loved her most had learned to know it.

As long as “The Spread Eagle” paid her a dollar a column for her “rubbish,” as she called it, Jo felt herself a woman of means, and spun her little romances diligently. But great plans fermented in her busy brain and ambitious mind, and the old tin kitchen in the garret held a slowly increasing pile of blotted manuscript, which was one day to place the name of March upon the roll of fame.

Laurie, having dutifully gone to college to please his grandfather, was now getting through it in the easiest possible manner to please himself. A universal favorite, thanks to money, manners, much talent, and the kindest heart that ever got its owner into scrapes by trying to get other people out of them, he stood in great danger of being spoilt, and probably would have been, like many another promising boy, if he had not possessed a talisman against evil in the memory of the kind old man who was bound up in his success, the motherly friend who watched over him as if he were her son, and last, but not least by any means, the knowledge that four innocent girls loved, admired, and believed in him with all their hearts.

Being only “a glorious human boy,” of course he frolicked and flirted, grew dandified, aquatic, sentimental, or gymnastic, as college fashions ordained; hazed and was hazed, talked slang, and more than once came perilously near suspension and expulsion. But as high spirits and the love of fun were the causes of these pranks, he always managed to save himself by frank confession, honorable atonement, or the irresistible power of persuasion which he possessed in perfection. In fact, he rather prided himself on his narrow escapes, and liked to thrill the girls with graphic accounts of his triumphs over wrathful tutors, dignified professors, and vanquished enemies. The “men of my class” were heroes in the eyes of the girls, who never wearied of the exploits of “our fellows,” and were frequently allowed to bask in the smiles of these great creatures, when Laurie brought them home with him.

Amy especially enjoyed this high honor, and became quite a belle among them; for her ladyship early felt and learned to use the gift of fascination with which she was endowed. Meg was too much absorbed in her private and particular John to care for any other lords of creation, and Beth too shy to do more than peep at them, and wonder how Amy dared to order them about so; but Jo felt quite in her element, and found it very difficult to refrain from imitating the gentlemanly attitudes, phrases, and feats, which seemed more natural to her than the decorums prescribed for young ladies. They all liked Jo immensely, but never fell in love with her, though very few escaped without paying the tribute of a sentimental sigh or two at Amy’s shrine. And speaking of sentiment brings us very naturally to the “Dove-cote.”

That was the name of the little brown house which Mr. Brooke had prepared for Meg’s first home. Laurie had christened it, saying it was highly appropriate to the gentle lovers, who “went on together like a pair of turtle-doves, with first a bill and then a coo.” It was a tiny house, with a little garden behind, and a lawn about as big as a pocket-handkerchief in front. Here Meg meant to have a fountain, shrubbery, and a profusion of lovely flowers; though just at present, the fountain was represented by a weather-beaten urn, very like a dilapidated slop-bowl; the shrubbery consisted of several young larches, undecided whether to live or die; and the profusion of flowers was merely hinted by regiments of sticks, to show where seeds were planted. But inside, it was altogether charming, and the happy bride saw no fault from garret to cellar. To be sure, the hall was so narrow, it was fortunate that they had no piano, for one never could have been got in whole; the dining-room was so small that six people were a tight fit; and the kitchen stairs seemed built for the express purpose of precipitating both servants and china pell-mell into the coal-bin. But once get used to these slight blemishes, and nothing could be more complete, for good sense and good taste had presided over the furnishing, and the result was highly satisfactory. There were no marble-topped tables, long mirrors, or lace curtains in the little parlor, but simple furniture, plenty of books, a fine picture or two, a stand of flowers in the bay-window, and, scattered all about, the pretty gifts which came from friendly hands, and were the fairer for the loving messages they brought.

I don’t think the Parian Psyche Laurie gave lost any of its beauty because John put up the bracket it stood upon; that any upholsterer could have draped the plain muslin curtains more gracefully than Amy’s artistic hand; or that any store-room was ever better provided with good wishes, merry words, and happy hopes, than that in which Jo and her mother put away Meg’s few boxes, barrels, and bundles; and I am morally certain that the spandy-new kitchen never could have looked so cosey and neat if Hannah had not arranged every pot and pan a dozen times over, and laid the fire all ready for lighting, the minute “Mis. Brooke came home.” I also doubt if any young matron ever began life with so rich a supply of dusters, holders, and piece-bags; for Beth made enough to last till the silver wedding came round, and invented three different kinds of dishcloths for the express service of the bridal china.

People who hire all these things done for them never know what they lose; for the homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them, and Meg found so many proofs of this, that everything in her small nest, from the kitchen roller to the silver vase on her parlor table, was eloquent of home love and tender forethought.

What happy times they had planning together, what solemn shopping excursions; what funny mistakes they made, and what shouts of laughter arose over Laurie’s ridiculous bargains. In his love of jokes, this young gentleman, though nearly through college, was as much of a boy as ever. His last whim had been to bring with him, on his weekly visits, some new, useful, and ingenious article for the young housekeeper. Now a bag of remarkable clothes-pins; next, a wonderful nutmeg-grater, which fell to pieces at the first trial; a knife-cleaner that spoilt all the knives; or a sweeper that picked the nap neatly off the carpet, and left the dirt; labor-saving soap that took the skin off one’s hands; infallible cements which stuck firmly to nothing but the fingers of the deluded buyer; and every kind of tin-ware, from a toy savings-bank for odd pennies, to a wonderful boiler which would wash articles in its own steam, with every prospect of exploding in the process.