“I will look at nothing, hear nothing, believe nothing which can in any way lessen my respect and affection for this young lady. She has prepared me for this. I know the enemy who is unmanly enough to belie and threaten her. I know that you both are unsuccessful lovers, and this explains your unjust, uncourteous treatment now.We all have committed faults and follies. I freely forgive Jean hers, and desire to know nothing of them from your lips. If she has innocently offended, pardon it for my sake, and forget the past.”
“But, Uncle, we have proofs that this woman is not what she seems. Her own letters convict her. Read them, and do not blindly deceive yourself,” cried Edward, indignant at his uncle’s words.
A low laugh startled them all, and in an instant they saw the cause of it. While Sir John spoke, Jean had taken the letters from the hand which he had put behind him, a favorite gesture of his, and, unobserved, had dropped them on the fire. The mocking laugh, the sudden blaze, showed what had been done. Both young men sprang forward, but it was too late; the proofs were ashes, and Jean Muir’s bold, bright eyes defied them, as she said, with a disdainful little gesture, “Hands off, gentlemen! You may degrade yourselves to the work of detectives, but I am not a prisoner yet. Poor Jean Muir you might harm, but Lady Coventry is beyond your reach.”
“Lady Coventry!” echoed the dismayed family, in varying tones of incredulity, indignation, and amazement.
“Aye, my dear and honored wife,” said Sir John, with a protecting arm about the slender figure at his side; and in the act, the words, there was a tender dignity that touched the listeners with pity and respect for the deceived man. “Receive her as such, and for my sake, forbear all further accusation,” he continued steadily. “I know what I have done. I have no fear that I shall repent it. If I am blind, let me remain so till time opens my eyes.We are going away for a little while, and when we return, let the old life return again, unchanged, except that Jean makes sunshine for me as well as for you.”
No one spoke, for no one knew what to say. Jean broke the silence, saying coolly, “May I ask how those letters came into your possession?”
“In tracing out your past life, Sydney found your friend Hortense. She was poor, money bribed her, and your letters were given up to him as soon as received. Traitors are always betrayed in the end,” replied Edward sternly.
Jean shrugged her shoulders, and shot a glance at Gerald, saying with her significant smile, “Remember that, monsieur, and allow me to hope that in wedding you will be happier than in wooing. Receive my congratulations, Miss Beaufort, and let me beg of you to follow my example, if you would keep your lovers.”
Here all the sarcasm passed from her voice, the defiance from her eye, and the one unspoiled attribute which still lingered in this woman’s artful nature shone in her face, as she turned toward Edward and Bella at their mother’s side.
“You have been kind to me,” she said, with grateful warmth. “I thank you for it, and will repay it if I can.To you I will acknowledge that I am not worthy to be this good man’s wife, and to you I will solemnly promise to devote my life to his happiness. For his sake forgive me, and let there be peace between us.”
There was no reply, but Edward’s indignant eyes fell before hers. Bella half put out her hand, and Mrs. Coventry sobbed as if some regret mingled with her resentment. Jean seemed to expect no friendly demonstration, and to understand that they forbore for Sir John’s sake, not for hers, and to accept their contempt as her just punishment.
“Come home, love, and forget all this,” said her husband, ringing the bell, and eager to be gone. “Lady Coventry’s carriage.”
And as he gave the order, a smile broke over her face, for the sound assured her that the game was won. Pausing an instant on the threshold before she vanished from their sight, she looked backward, and fixing on Gerald the strange glance he remembered well, she said in her penetrating voice, “Is not the last scene better than the first?”
Little Women is undoubtedly Alcott’s masterpiece. When in 1868 Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers approached her about writing a girls’ book, Alcott was unenthusiastic. But drawing upon her own and her sisters’ experience, she managed to produce the first part of Little Women, all that she initially planned to write, in a matter of months. Both Niles and Alcott, who had feared the book might be dull, were more pleased with it than they had anticipated. And readers loved it. As soon as Alcott recognized the popular success that she had unwittingly achieved, she set to work on a sequel, determined not to marry Jo to Laurie as her readers demanded. The second volume, known as Good Wives in England, was published the next year to equal acclaim. Since then, the novel has never been out of print, and it has been beloved by generations of girls who, when grown, pass it on to their daughters. Although a few young readers have always found the book cloyingly sweet or relentlessly preachy, Little Women marked a departure from the didactic children’s books of its own day, and many modern women credit tomboy Jo March with providing them with inspiration to write or follow unconventional careers. Scholars, too, in recent years have given the book serious critical attention, and it is regularly assigned in college courses. Little Women appears now in a dozen different editions, many edited by leading feminist scholars.The text for the following chapters is that of the Penguin Classic edited by Elaine Showalter. As Showalter explains, her text is based on the 1868 and 1869 editions, whereas most are reprints of the 1880 edition in which Alcott responded to criticisms of her slang and colloquial language by adopting a more genteel but less lively style.
The two chapters presented here, from part 2, portray the literary career of Jo, which closely parallels that of her creator. In chapter 27, “Literary Lessons,” Jo receives a one-hundred-dollar prize for a sensational story just as Alcott did in 1862 for “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” And as Alcott did with her first novel, Moods, Jo edits her book to suit her publisher and receives conflicting reviews. Jo’s defense of her book at the end of the chapter echoes Alcott’s defense of Moods in her letters (see those to Moncure Conway and Mr.Ayer in this volume). In chapter 34, however, Jo’s career begins to diverge from Alcott’s. Fortunately for us, Alcott never had a “friend” like Professor Bhaer to persuade her to repudiate and destroy her sensation fiction.The fact that Alcott was continuing to market her sensation stories even as she penned the scene in which Jo burns hers forces us to question whether the narrator’s approval reflects the author’s.
In response to the dictum of Jo’s editor that “Morals don’t sell nowadays,” the narrator comments, “which was not quite a correct statement, by the way.”Thus Alcott slyly suggests within the text of Little Women itself that economics, not moral scruples, determined her choice of genres.