Word: alcotts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just seen Little Women. Now dry your tears and read the book -- but which version? At your local bookstore you'll be confronted with the Louisa May Alcott classic as well as a new "novelization" based on the screenplay based on the classic. Below is a key passage from each. Can you tell which was written to please the marketing department at Columbia Pictures and which came from the pen of an impecunious schoolteacher, seamstress, nurse and domestic who grew up surrounded by fiery abolitionists and transcendentalists? (Warning! Don't read further if you're male and therefore...
...Alcott wrote the second passage...
...children's classic can be described as a book so inviting that a young reader wants to escape into the world it creates. By that definition, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, an account of four sisters living in Concord, Massachusetts, during the 1860s, is immortal. The author drew on her own impoverished childhood as a daughter of Bronson Alcott, a feckless member of the Concord enlightenment. Generations of girls have yearned to join the March household, and they remember the story's high points better than crises of their own lives...
...that aims to teach girls conventional morals and decorum has been so enshrined in the feminist honor roll? In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir recalls it fondly; of course, she identified with the bold, artistic Jo. In a 1983 essay, feminist Nina Auerbach suavely co-opts Alcott, concentrating on Marmee's counsel against materialism and Jo's determination to be unconventional...
...have to worry about Little Women. As a movie, it is exotic in all the wrong ways for today's market -- all hoop-skirts, candlelight and genteel language. In Louisa May Alcott's world, heavy snowfall was a big-time special effect, sausages for breakfast made for a woozily joyful Christmas, and it was omnipresent death, not omnipresent divorce, that threatened childhood's serenity. Can a movie that faithfully reflects this life -- at once harder and more innocent than ours -- and does so without condescension, preachment or gross sentiment, make its way in our times...