Channeling Amy March

I am a huge fan of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s great novel about the four March sisters, whom Alcott takes from their Civil War girlhoods to adulthood. I stumbled across it early on in my life when family friends gave me a drastically edited Golden Press illustrated version for Christmas gift the early 1960s. I soon afterwards came across a more complete edition in my grandparents’ home and took it both home and to heart. I have probably read the novel fifty or more times since I was ten. I own three versions today: my badly dog-eared Golden Press copy, the battered copy from my grandparents, and a complete “uncut” version my mother gave me fifteen years ago.

In short, Little Women was a Big Influence on my reading life.

I wanted to be Jo, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be? Jo was bright and impetuous. Jo was not afraid to climb a tree or cut off her hair to raise money for her mother to travel to Washington to care for her wounded husband. Jo was funny and always her own person, even when that got her into trouble. She turned down the boy next door and found lasting happiness with a man after her own heart. As the novel closes, Jo and her husband are operating a boy’s boarding school on their hearts and minds and a shoestring budget. What bliss!

The other sisters float around the novel, although none are so vivid a character as Jo. There is Meg, the oldest and the most domestic, and Beth the do-gooder who dies heartbreakingly young.

And then there was Amy, the baby of the family. Selfish, silly Amy with her golden curls and her pretensions and airs. Amy who got to go to Europe instead of Jo because Amy had better manners.

I found Amy the most tedious of the March sisters, and the most annoying.

But the truth is I have my Amy March moments, although not in the curls and the dancing. No, I identify with Amy when she realizes that while she has some artistic skills, the brilliance of a true artist is far beyond her ability. Her trip abroad during which she hoped to hone her skills instead reveals her shortcomings. Amy announces that she is setting aside her dreams of being a “great” artist, “because talent isn't genius and no amount of energy can make it so.”

Boy, I’ll say.

All my life I have wanted to be a writer. Oh, I write—letters, a journal, press releases, this blog. At one point I wrote a monthly newspaper article about downtown Delaware architecture that won a community following. All satisfying, but my attempts at “bigger” projects—a short story, a novel, poetry—have all died on the vine. Repeatedly.

The writer Janet Flanner commented “genius is immediate but talent takes time.” I still like to think I may have a book inside of me, perhaps the story of Red Cross overseas volunteers during World War II, springing from the notes and records my mother-in-law left behind.

Only time will tell.