Not Little Women

“Little Women” is a novel authored by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), originally in two volumes (1868 and 1869). The Not Little Women authors of my recent reading include Jane Austen (1775-1817), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and Edith Wharton (1862-1937), each from bygone eras when women struggled even more than now for equal treatment in recognition and compensation.

Not quite as repressed perhaps as author George Eliot (1819-1880) must have felt when she used her male pen name instead of her birth name Mary Ann Evans. Some of read “Silas Marner” in high school and knew that we were reading a novel by George Eliot, not Mary Ann Evans.

I am in awe of the sensitivity to human behaviors expressed by the above three Not Little Women of American and British fiction. One might argue that their perspectives are only from the vantage point of privilege and therefore so biased and narrow, even demeaning to the less fortunate, that their positions in the world of literature should be taken more lightly, even discarded.

I have heard such an argument made in respect to Thomas Jefferson and his slaveholder colleagues of American Constitution-writing times. They lived essentially as kings, their slaves as no more than vassals making a fief possible, so how can we take what they did in their slice of time as meaningful to us now? They were so flawed. Yes, they were, but their Constitution stands as their gift to us anyway. We are all flawed. So too, for sure, authors Austen, Woolf, and Wharton. I admit to that, but so what?

They did not miss the flaws in their high society characters. They exposed them, titillated us with them, just as Mark Twain mocked slaveholders in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and the ambitious grifters of “The Gilded Age.” It is the gift of the author to capture and put her characters in a fishbowl, to make them real, and ridiculous when that is what they are.

My three Not Little Women authors do just that, each with a gift for words to make human behavior real, and human feelings sharply revealed, even when they are of the privileged. They have done so with sensitivity to roles of women in society and often with wry humor, sometimes with extreme sadness, always with human feeling. They have let us know what life is at the top, and sometimes below the top, what it was like in their society, at their time in history.

It is so cool to experience that as a reader, to feel the words that come out so strangely now to our modern ears. To have to go back and reread sentences, even whole paragraphs, because people just do not speak that way in our society now. To hear the story from a woman’s perspective, and make no mistake that that is a different perspective. It is different by what it manages to express in content, different in tone, different in sympathy, and different in seeing humor and putting that into words.

Theirs is a woman’s world writ large, and there should be no begging by them to be heard now. But where is the stampede to read them outside of freshman English Lit 101?

I love them, all three! And so might you too.