A friend of mine has a theory that you can tell a lot about someone
from which of the Little Women she preferred. The trouble is, most
people I know picked Jo. With her tomboyish ways and authorial
ambitions, she was clearly a more thrilling model than Meg (too
housewifely), Beth (too virtuous, and doomed besides), or Amy (vain
and bratty). Still, for a lot of us avid readers, Marmee and her
four girls were a profound early influence. Their struggles to make
do, to be good, and to realize their dreams seemed contemporary to
me in the 1950s, even though Louisa May Alcott's story took place
almost 100 years earlier.

I never thought much about Mr. March. Perhaps the notion of an
absent father and an all-female household resonated with an era
when emotionally remote men went off to work and joined the family
only intermittently, on weekends. Or perhaps it was just that this
was almost entirely (and delightfully) a world in which males
didn't yet count for much, which is certainly the way I felt before
the age of 12. Despite the endearing Laurie, the helpful and ardent
Mr. Brooke, and the avuncular Professor Baer, LITTLE WOMEN is not
an equal-opportunity novel.

In MARCH, Geraldine Brooks redresses the balance, giving us a
sensitive chaplain from Concord, Massachusetts, who volunteers for
the Union cause and finds himself caught in the bitter carnage and
wrecked ideals of the Civil War, finally ending up in a military
hospital, whence Marmee (as readers of LITTLE WOMEN will remember)
is summoned to nurse him back to life. In flashbacks, we learn the
details of March's earlier life as a peddler in the antebellum
South, a culture outwardly gracious and essentially cruel; his
courtship of Marmee (who turns out to have been a hothead who Jo
strongly resembles); and his anti-slavery activities and passion
for educational reform. In fact, Brooks --- author of a stunning
novel about the Black Plague, YEAR OF WONDERS --- based March's
character explicitly on Louisa May's father, Bronson Alcott, just
as Louisa May based her LITTLE WOMEN characters on her own
family.

Bronson Alcott is the unsung Transcendentalist; his radical views
were a major influence on Emerson and Thoreau, yet today he is
known principally as the improvident father (he wasn't much of a
breadwinner) of a famous children's novelist, writes Brooks in an
essay for The New Yorker (January 10, 2005). Despite
ill-fated projects such as the utopian community Fruitlands and a
general tendency to let the purity of his principles sabotage any
worldly success, Alcott held views remarkable for his time: He
opposed corporal punishment in schools, believed in education
through "conversations" rather than rote memorization, and
supported women's suffrage.

Some of the most touching scenes in this novel involve education.
When March is sent by the Union Army to start a school for freed
slaves on a former plantation, he writes Marmee of his pupils:
"We are so used to judge a man's mind by how lettered he is, yet
here I have already seen that there are many other measures. With
book-learning so long denied them, they have, perforce, cultivated
diverse other skills. Their visual acuity is remarkable, and their
memories prodigious." Although they have no ink or paper and
must learn to write by scratching in the dirt with sticks, his
students become devoted to March and watch over him when he
contracts malaria; later in the story, they save his life.

But Brooks is appropriately wary of projecting our own 21st century
version of moral enlightenment --- about race, gender, or class ---
upon her characters: She is well aware that even the most
progressive intellectuals of the 19th century had limitations.
Consider, for example, March's remark that the ears of his "little
women" should not be sullied with descriptions of the barbarous
rapes and mutilations that take place under slavery; or Marmee's
reaction to the unpalatably large number of impoverished Negroes
("Are there no end to the people?") in wartime Washington, D.C.,
quite unlike the "one or two colored citizens, carefully dressed
and decorous in manner" that she is accustomed to seeing in
Concord.

MARCH is beautifully written, cleverly conceived, and dramatically
plotted; my one complaint is that the central figure doesn't
entirely come alive. In her New Yorker piece, Brooks
comments that Bronson Alcott, while possessing a "joyful,
affectionate nature," was also guilty of "narcissism, moral
certitude, and impractical idealism." Perhaps her diligent research
created some inhibition when it came to building March's character,
for there is a relentlessly self-righteous (and at the same time
self-abnegating) strain in him that rouses impatience in the
reader. You feel like saying, "Oh, get on with it!" MARCH is also a
double love story --- the objects of his affection being Marmee and
an elegant, highly educated former slave named Grace --- and I must
confess that I found the women more interesting than the man.

In a neat twist, toward the end of the book Brooks abruptly shifts
the point of view from Mr. to Mrs. March, and Marmee's character,
taken out of the purely maternal role she plays in LITTLE WOMEN, is
a revelation: courageous (she hid runaways as part of the
Underground Railroad), given to losing her temper, and sexually
eager. Her ambivalence about her flawed, visionary husband; her
difficulty in adhering to the prescribed demure model of womanhood
(March patronizingly refers to the "lawless, gypsy elements of her
nature"); and her hopes for the girls (she refuses to punish Jo's
outbursts, saying that "the world would crush her spirit soon
enough") all found a response in me. I was sorry when the narration
passed back to Mr. March. Despite Brooks's best efforts, women
still insist on dominating this story.

Older children's books such as LITTLE WOMEN are like family
heirlooms, handed down by generations. My mother and grandmother
loved it, and Brooks, in her Afterword, thanks her own
mother for suggesting that she read it. Too saintly? More than a
bit sentimental? Maybe, but passionate and inspiring too, and the
same can be said of MARCH. Thanks to Geraldine Brooks, the father
of the "little women" is no longer faceless.