Little Women's Dad: Geraldine Brooks on March

Ask me what book influenced my life the most, and I'll answer unhesitatingly: Lousia May Alcott's Little Women.  I got it for Christmas when I was in Grade Two, and began reading it immediately--but because I wasn't a very good reader it took me until April to finish it.

And then I re-read again.  And again.  And again.

Jo was my heroine for years, and the family's high-minded Abolitionist politics formed my own political conscience.  Alcott is responsible in a very direct manner for my participation in that famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held just over 50 years ago.

The resemblances between the Alcott's creation, the March family, and her own are clear, I learned from reading at least one biography of her.   But I hadn't thought too much about the backstory of Marches themselves.  Then I picked up Geraldine Brooks's March: A Novel because I liked her Caleb's Crossing so much. 

What a pleasure to read Brooks's imagining of the adult world behind Little Women and the difficult moral choices the Marches made!

The book is told in two voices. One is John March, a Yankee preacher who had made a fortune as a pedlar in the South, to return north and become a militant opponent of slavery.  Marrying a young woman even more passionate than he, he supports John Brown's rebellion, gives all his money to the Abolitionist, tries to raise four daughters in reduced circumstances, and then volunteers as a chaplain to the Union forces once the Civil War begins. The other is of his wife, Marmee, who comes to his bedside in Washington when he is wounded.

That much any reader of Little Women already will know: the book opens with Mr. March away in the War, and ends with his return a year later.  What Brooks imagines is his conflict over going, his repulsion at the killing, his tortured attempts to reconcile his "cowardice" with very natural instincts to save himself, and his desire for both his wife and a young slave woman whom he met when he was young.

She also shows us Marmee's conflict, her realization that she should have, could have insisted he remain behind--he was 41 after all--and her sense of betrayal that he had given his fortune away without consulting her while keeping his brief affairs with another woman a secret from her all these years.

The tone appears to me to be spot on, Brooke's research is extensive, and the moral dilemmas her characters face,  truly thought-provoking.  The book won the Pultizer Prize in 2005: the judges that year  were spot-on.

The images are of Alcott and Brooks.