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…