Little Women at 150 ed. by Daniel Shealy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Little Women at 150 ed. by Daniel Shealy Laureen Tedesco (bio) Little Women at 150, edited by Daniel Shealy. UP of Mississippi, 2022. (Series: Children's Literature Association Series) Little Women at 150 is a delightful exploration of the enduring legacy of Louisa May Alcott's best-known work, offering more of the biographically grounded, textually attentive scholarship that has brought Alcott's work into university classrooms, scholarly editions, and interdisciplinary journals. This collection of eight essays and a meticulously researched introduction commemorates Little Women's sesquicentennial in 2018: "Little Women at 150, while championing Alcott's success, helps to reveal the layered complexity and significance of one of the United States' most well-known novels" (Shealy 16). The collection features eight new essays by ground-breaking Alcott scholars who, in addition to analyzing Alcott's life and works in critical articles and books, have produced critical editions, written biographies, edited the author's letters and journals, collected her anonymous and pseudonymous "thrillers," and republished contemporary reviews and reminiscences: "Utilizing various critical approaches, the essays are not focused on a particular topic or theme. Instead, they are richly eclectic, revealing the complexity and sophistication of Alcott's most famous work" (11). The essay collection begins and ends with reflections on Alcott's literary achievements: editor Daniel Shealy's carefully constructed case for Little Women's enduring significance and Gregory Eiselein's well-reasoned closing essay asserting Alcott's merits as a major author worthy of an ongoing place in literary canons, single-author courses at universities, and continuing recognition and study as a writer whose entire body of work offers much to admire. Shealy's introduction charts in compelling detail the immediate and long-term success of the novel Alcott so reluctantly started. Shealy draws on his own and other contributors' decades of work with primary sources to chronicle the book's publication history, early reviews, and eventual status as "classic" by the early twentieth century (8). Shealy identifies what Beverly Lyon Clark has called "[t]he afterlife of Little Women" "as its story became a part of the culture of the United States and new generations discovered their own version of the March sisters" through Broadway, musical, film, and TV adaptations of the book (9). Shealy frames the story of the novel's remarkable fan base—including cultural icons "Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J.K. Rowling" [End Page 205] (8)—with the author's own astonishment at its success. "Not only," he observes, "did she seem to view 'juvenile' fiction as inferior, but she also initially resisted writing the novel that continues to endure after 150 years since its initial publication" (5). He also traces the growth in scholarly approaches to the novel as serious literature, beginning with feminist approaches in the mid-twentieth century, to demonstrate that Alcott scholarship now represents a strong, multidisciplinary body of academic inquiry, textual editing, critical evaluations, biographical investigation, and pedagogical approaches, with a range of theoretical underpinnings. In the book's closing essay, Eiselein adds further detail to Shealy's already impressive introductory survey of Alcott studies, highlighting the groundbreaking work that feminist scholars did in the 1980s and 1990s to justify admission of Little Women into "paracanons" of beloved texts (182). Subsequent decades of feminist and other theoretically informed work—much of it by contributors to this volume—gave Alcott's reputation the heft it now enjoys. Eiselein measures Alcott's reputation, scholarly treatment, enduring reputation and influence on literature history, canonicity, and "sizable and varied body of writing," as well as literary judgments regarding her works' artistic excellence and aesthetic importance (184). Eiselein concludes, Alcott's work matters. And it is a testimony to her ambitious imagination, her creative energy, and her talent that her work continues to resonate with and shed light on our contemporary situation. Teaching Little Women as a significant literary masterpiece and teaching Alcott herself as a major author in the classroom but also treating her as a major author in our critical work, both academically and broadly public, make that point clearly and powerfully. (200) While the essays' critical approaches, topics, and themes vary, they reveal intriguing intersections...