The Little Women- Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy - have grown up and are ready to go out and fulfil their childhood dreams. Pursuing ideals of work and love, each takes a slightly different path and each finds hope, happiness in their own way.
It is three years since we last met the inimitable March sisters and much has changed since we left them as Little Women at the close of the last book. Meg, the eldest and most sensible of the sisters, is preparing to marry Mr Brooke. She no longer works as a governess, instead happily looking after her young twins, Demi and Daisy. Jo, as ever the life and soul of any gathering, goes to live in New York where she works as a governess. She is concerned that Laurie, the March girls' friend and neighbour, may be planning to propose to her and she will have to refuse him because she doesn't love him. Beth, the sweet and kind third daughter, is becoming more ill by the day. She has never recovered from the scarlet fever and now it looks as though her health may go from bad to worse. And Amy, the darling baby of the family, seems finally to be catching up with her elder sisters. She goes on a tour to Europe, developing her considerable artistic skills and will end up surprising them all by marrying someone the family knows very well indeed... An intriguing sequel to the better known Little Women, Good Wives is a more mature book and shows some of the harsher realities the girls face in difficult times. Ultimately it is just as uplifting as its better known prequel with a strikingly modern message of female empowerment.
Louisa May Alcott, daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, one of Emerson's circle of friends, was born in Philadelphia in 1832. Educated mainly by H. D. Thoreau and her father, Miss Alcott served as a hospital nurse during the Civil War. Her first book, Flower Fables, appeared in 1854, and her next work, Hospital Sketches (1863), consisted of her letters home from the Union Hospital during the war. She first gained a wide reputation with Little Women (1868-69), and her best subsequent work was done in the same field. Her chief publications after Little Women are the following: An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag (1871-79), Work (1873), Silver Pitchers (1876), Rose in Bloom (1876), Jo's Boys (1886), and A Garland for Girls (1887). Good Wives is the second part of Little Women. Miss Alcott died in 1888.
