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Louisa May Alcott, Feminist?
Brenda Wineapple
Stifled Rage
Louisa May Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer, which meant that despite her gift for tart observation she often retreated into homilies and platitudes.
Colin Grant
The Jeopardy Is the Juice
Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, Crook Manifesto, depicts its characters’ perilous navigation of race, class, and crime in 1970s Harlem.
Michelle Nijhuis
The Digital Planet
Digital technologies may worsen environmental problems, but they can also assist in the protection and restoration of ecosystems —and strengthen our relationships with them.
Elena Kostyuchenko, translated by Bela Shayevich
Russia’s Election Ritual
Vladimir Putin has been reelected president in another sham exercise in democracy.
Free from the Archives
In the Review’s April 18 issue, Brenda Wineapple reads Louisa May Alcott’s selected essays and finds a “writer who converted into a tart prose style much of her anguish—and anger—at the circumstances in which she found herself, as a woman, as a dutiful daughter, as a second-class citizen, and, ironically, as a best-selling author who worked hard to maintain her popularity.”
In the magazine’s November 3, 2005, issue, on the occasion of a Library of America reissue—“the literary equivalent of the Academy Awards”—Alison Lurie revisited Alcott’s Little Women and its sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, and found that, while the books “may now seem nostalgic and old-fashioned rather than, as in 1868, innovative and sometimes almost shocking,” they “were able to present and comment on a variety of possible roles open to mid-nineteenth-century American women”—furthering the national discourse on women’s independence and progressive education.
Alison Lurie
Liberated Girls
“In most juvenile fiction of the time everything was drawn in black and white. Girls’ books…featured a single suffering, self-sacrificing heroine of near-perfect virtue and patience. But in Little Women there are four heroines, all different and all imperfect. In the course of the story they struggle to become good, but like most human beings, they never completely succeed. The implication is that it is possible to have serious faults—vanity, anger, impatience, timidity, and selfishness—and still deserve happiness.
