[Victoria]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Victoria, I think this was the article I read, when I was reading about the new film:
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/...urie-amy-bhaer

Bookpossum I loved reading this article! Thank you for posting it. I don’t usually like it when Directors change someone else’s story, but I found this Director’s decisions very satisfying. She’s definitely altered the ending as it’s written but I think she could make an argument that she’s being faithful to the actual character of the sisters, and saying explicitly what Alcott wanted to say, but could only imply.

Originally Posted by issybird

I agree entirely. I want to add in this context Anne’s ferocious temper. Just how satisfying was it when she thwacked Gilbert across the head with her slate? The thwack heard round the world, it seems to me; when would there be another literary instance of a girl refusing to be harassed?

I’ve also been thinking about Tom Sawyer in this context (and coincidentally currently listening to a different book by Mark Twain). Tom’s also an orphan who gets into scrapes and struggles with authority, but I don’t get the same sense of a moral judgment attached to his behavior and a need to reform. He’s just a bad boy. Boys will be boys, as with Gilbert teasing the girls. Penrod is another example, although not an orphan. So mostly I see the boys’ books as an encouragement to act out, but girls’ books as an encouragement to be good, unfortunately. Boys’ books had a lot more scope, it seems to me, with the whole adventure genre which was closed to girls and wherein the boys could be noble; girls needed to be noble on the domestic front.

Excellent point about that thwack issybird. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I can’t think of a parallel, outside of today’s “me too” phenomenon. Now that you point it out, I see how remarkable it was.

I agree that most of the boys’ adventure stories have far fewer strictures. Luckily, I didn’t see myself excluded from them, so was able to read the stories and imagine myself and pretend to be in the boys’ shoes.

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

I did read Tom Sawyer as a lad but my reaction to it then was quite lukewarm—despite the praise heaped on it my my grade school teacher. In fact, while I was a voracious reader my diet was about 90% science fiction. Andre Norton was a great favourite and her work is (IMO) eminently rereadable yet. The Tom Corbett books are cleverly plotted for the most part and though they tried to have a basic valid science fiction background they have certainly dated in that respect. One interesting aspect to them is the presence of a top notch scientist who is a woman and the adverts in the original publications were addressed to “boys and girls”. I take a little nostalgic space trip in them from time to time and rather enjoy that but they don’t replicate the fascinating excitement of my childhood experience. I devoured those old Groff Conklin science fiction anthologies from our public library and have collected them since. Some of the stories which I found fascinating I now realise are pretty low-grade while others that my young self thought rubbish are, in fact, true trail-blazers.

These books and others of that sort did give me an abiding interest in actual science and I did get a minor in Biological Science for my primary degree (my major was English). How much this is the case for others who shared this type of experience I don’t know though one person in my immediate family has gone along a similar path in the sense that her childhood reading had a lasting effect on her later interests.

Thanks for sharing your experience fantasyfan; it’s interesting to hear about the differences and similarities. Like you, my young reading life was hugely influential. Through Anne and Jo, I thought writing would be my destiny and went on to major in English literature. Though I didn’t write, books have been a lifelong gift from Alcott and Montgomery.

I enjoy fantasy and science fiction now, but didn’t realize they even existed until I took the English degree. So other than LOTR, I’ve only read contemporary works. It’s interesting to hear about earlier authors who were inspiring young minds. I’ve made a note of A Norton and the others and it will be fun to look them up.