12 February 2022: Still swimming in all things Alcott these days, and this quotation from Ednah Dow Cheney's 1899 review of Little Women really makes me smile:
“Louisa May Alcott is universally recognized as the greatest and most popular story-teller for children in her generation. She has known the way to the hearts of young people…Plato says: ‘Beware of those who teach fables to children’; and it is impossible to estimate the influence which the popular writer of fiction has over the audience [she] wins to listen to [her] tale…[Her] seductive powers of imagination and sentiment takes [sic] possession of the fancy and the heart before judgement and reason are aroused to defend the citadel ” (qtd. in Quimby, 13).
As Karin Quimby notes, Cheney--a great admirer of Alcott and one of her earliest biographers--senses what so many readers see about the novel: “Cheney betrays the anxiety that the story contains something more subversive, more seductive, in the regions of imagination and feeling” (14).
Work Cited
Quimby,
Karin. “The Story of Jo: Literary Tomboys, Little Women, and the
Sexual-Textual Politics of Narrative Desire.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-22. Project Muse.
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