2009
Toward the end of last year, the Guardian published a touching letter from a reader recalling her childhood engagement with Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott’s classic family story. Generations of girls, she said, have “seared in their memory” the episode where Jo, the second of the genteelly impoverished March girls, sells her long hair to help fund her mother’s visit to the bedside of her wounded father, who is an army chaplain. It’s the time of the American Civil War, and Jo wishes she could enlist. That’s all very well, I used to sneer; nobody’s going to hand her a rifle and pack, and tell her “Off you go, girl.” Jo is generally held to be a role model for the budding writer; why, then, did I hate her like poison? She’s a tomboy, who outrages her sisters by whistling. She uses schoolboy slang, and says she wishes she’d been born male. So did I, once; but by the age of four I’d worked out that you weren’t going to make the swap. Jo’s fifteen when Little Women begins, and she hasn’t worked it out yet. How I despised her, with her preposterous literary aspirations! She writes plays for the family to perform—toe-curling melodramas. And when she first presents a manuscript to an editor, she ties it up with a red ribbon. Somehow, even at the age of eight, I knew that was a ludicrous thing to do. And, given her general mindset, shouldn’t she have been glad to get her head cropped? Mr. March’s misfortune is Jo’s opportunity; that’s what I thought, anyway, in my first acid efforts at literary criticism.
My preferred model for the life to come was What Katy Did. Katy is the eldest of a large family of brothers and sisters; her mother is dead, her kind papa is a family doctor. I don’t know what, when I was eight, I wanted more—a benign masculine presence, or Katy’s facility in making up stories, verses and riddles. I read Susan Coolidge’s book many times. She and the author of Little Women were rough contemporaries, born in 1835 and 1832 respectively. Neither married, and they both used their younger selves as models for their sparky heroines. Little Women has never lost popularity, but I was surprised to find Katy and her family on the shelves of a local bookshop. The cover of one recent edition pictures a young girl on a swing, foregrounding an episode in the story that, as a child, I didn’t think was central. Rereading it, I have to admit it is. Katy, against adult advice, uses a swing that has not been properly secured. She falls, is paralyzed, and becomes an invalid for many months. She plunges into depression till visited by her saintly cousin Helen, a longtime invalid, who teaches her how to be saintly too: not to complain, never to show her pain, to enact cheerfulness and make an asset of immobility.
It’s sickening stuff, and for reasons of my own I wish now I had never read it. As a small Catholic child, I had already taken on board the recommended attitude to suffering. You didn’t avoid it, but “offered it up.” It seems likely I also internalised Cousin Helen’s message. It went underground, and surfaced when I myself became ill in my early teens. At that time in my life, I didn’t squeal and kick enough. If I had regarded pain as an insult and an outrage, I might have made such a nuisance of myself that I got help; my medical history and my life would have been different. You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart.
Perhaps if I’d had more books, newer books, they would have diluted the noxious message and made my own imagination less collusive. The portrait of the Carr family enthralled me; what was important was not the accident on the swing, but the shared imaginative life of these brothers and sisters. In What Katy Did at School, the western girl (who has got back the use of her legs) goes to an eastern boarding school, sees other customs and manners, but finds another congenial society of witty young women who can all turn a verse. I didn’t find out What Katy Did Next until I was grown up and bought a secondhand copy. What she does is go on a European tour, and meet the dashing young naval lieutenant she will marry. It’s a less amusing book than the earlier ones, a travelogue with a perfunctory storyline. But there is one heightened, hallucinogenic moment: while seeing the sights in London, Katy spots George Eliot getting out of a cab. “She stood for a moment while she gave her fare to the cabman, and Katy looked as one who might not look again, and carried away a distinct picture of the un-beautiful, interesting, remarkable face.”
When I encountered this, I blinked and read it again. It was an intersection of two imaginary planes; as much a breach of the rules as if, nowadays, I woke up to find one of my own invented characters in the kitchen making tea. Who is more real, Katy or George Eliot? I vote for Katy. I am surprised, returning to them, to find Coolidge’s books so relentless in their piety, though no more queasily moralizing than Little Women. As a child I must have thought all books were like that: vehicles of moral improvement, edification; books talked like adults, served adult interests. It was not until I was ten, and began Jane Eyre, that I encountered a story which seemed designed not to improve me, but describe me: “a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand.” Jane is required by her guardian to simulate childlike qualities, but can’t manage it. I understood that pressure. I recognized Jane’s perpetual, fretful anxiety; the world around her is jostling with hostile forces, with mean and malign intentions that the March girls and Katy had never glimpsed. “Let me be a little girl as long as I can,” wheedles Jo March. Oh, you double-dyed fool! I had never read a book that did not idealize childhood until Charlotte Brontë presented me with one. Jane Eyre will not thrive unless she grows up fast, and perhaps not even then. For the first time an author was trusting me with the truth; it was there, for me, that the writing life began.