Wynona Ryder as Jo coming with accepted manuscript to Gabriel Bryne as Prof Bauer (1996 LW, directed Gillian Armstrong, my favorite of all the LW movies
A thumbnail of the pair (hurt badly by the ugly insistence on ownership by a website)
Friends and readers,
Day 6/10 of books that influenced me, had a discernible impact. Yet again problematic. Maybe because books have meant so much to me, that even when younger I had several “going” at a time. I was a reading girl. So from when I was around 10 or 11 reading as an adolescent, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Good Wives was my truly central book. It was sturdy. Below is the cover of the book I cherished for years.
I still remember chapters, the moral lessons of several, lines and incidents come floating up, details, Meg learns it’s better not to dress up to the point you make yourself uncomfortable, Meg and Jo each wear one soiled glove and one clean; Amy’s birthday party to which no one came, the newspaper (like Pickwick); Jo’s cutting her hair; Jo and Laurie as friends; the trip to Europe Jo didn’t get to go on; Beth’s death; I loved that Jo married Prof Bauer and like those film adaptations where the relationship is made deep, understandable, the male character appealing (1970 with Angela Down as Jo, 1995 with Wynona Ryder as Jo, even the 2018, where the best role was given to Marmee and actress was Emily Watson). My edition had picturesque black-and-white illustrations (in the style of the above) and I colored the lines with colored inks, tracing over the black lines. I encouraged my daughters to read the book and both did, with Laura going on to lovie Little Men better (it might be the better book, her depressive state of mind, about an outcast).
Recently I embarked on watching a series of these Little Women film adaptations (170-2018) back-to-back and writing about them. I lost my DVDs of them when my computer broke down, but now a kind friend is replacing them for me, and I hope this year to do justice to this set of films — though it is the book that influenced me. Kindness, courtesy, compassion, how all people should be treated with dignity, on the side of reading and writing girls, Jo’s long choice of spinsterhood rather than marry where there was no deep congeniality and sharing of true innate values and gifts. It was not the female community so much for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew#Ghostwriters
I have vowed to myself the value of these blogs is I tell as accurately as I can what comprises the truth. So, at the same time I was reading and rereading the Mary Poppins books still, I had started the four at age 8 while I lived in the southeast Bronx and vegetation was not something we a lot of. I loved how the character was on the surface hard and not giving, but when all adults were gone, one escaped into a magical happier beautiful world. The Park was my favorite, though years later Margaret Drabble’s Seven Sisters picked up on the story of the Pleiade in another of the Poppins books (so I loved the Drabble). At first I did not like Disney movie (I saw it when I was age 18) as destroying what was so crucial to the character (Julia Andrews was all sweetness), but after a while adjusted to its projection of a similar message through dance – great dancing by her and Dick Van Dyke, especially the chimney sweep piece. A new faux realistic and sociological take on Travers’s life see Saving Mr Banks.
Bert and Mary
I’m torn because the other meaningful seemingly English book was Burnett’s Secret Garden which I so loved as an escape into a garden (I was with Mary Lennox all the way); I was very fond of Colin and wanted to name a son after him. When I found myself on a boat sailing up the English channel and saw the white cliffs of Dover I ws so foolish as to be nostalgic and glad to see these cliffs “at last.” Don’t reread Secret Garden if you don’t ant to be dismayed by its racism, snobbery towards Dickin and his sister Susan and their gratitude to be talked to at all is insufferable: they are very poor and the book is okay with that.
These books go so deep one doesn’t need to back them up by the more widely disseminated movies
Much less because I can’t quote many lines, specific scenes don’t come up and I can’t remember any character I could identify with but Nancy Drew, but I know I was reading many of these at the same time as Little Women and The Secret Garden. L, and they and Poppins (or a foolish ignorant naive young girl) created an Anglophilia in me, marrying a gentleman, preferably English or Anglo in origin, is urged on the reader. At any rate I married an Englishman.
Like GWTW, the old Nancy Drews (they are rewritten each decade) is ugly in its denigration of “criminals” as always non-white, non-American, coarse, lower class and I would never recommend these books to any girl now. Carolyn Keene is a pseudo-nym for a stable of complicit authors, the first Margaret Wirt Benson. I did like how she would get into her “blue coupe” and drive into the horizon, a symbol of liberty. Years later my first truly chosen car was a blue Chevy Cavalier, now I too had a blue car to drive about in. On my own behalf I stopped reading these books when I began to root for the “villain” girl of the Dana books, Lettie Briggs. I began to detest Nancy Drew for her self-satisfaction and just about everything about her that made her think her better than other people. I tried Judy Bolton and the books felt realer (they had a single author I learned in later life and were never rewritten) but she marries half-way through an FBI agent and the books become as reactionary as Nancy Drew while much duller: Peter is endlessly rescuing her. Nancy Drew is today a global figure: I’ve had students who came from Nigeria cite a Nancy Drew as her favorite book from childhood.
Ellen
Diane LaBarge: “I reread The Secret Garden a couple of weeks ago, and although there are parts of it I admire so much, the condescension to the working class characters was disturbing. It seemed like Burnett felt she was being very broad-minded to allow Mary to mingle with and be helped by these decent people.”
Me: Yes. My father tried to reread it to me and he was so dismayed he had to give it up. The recent musical changes all that and the film adaptation turned the book into a romance.
Me: “Honestly, maybe it’s good that adolescent girls have so many other choices today for like GWTW, Secret Garden, and Nancy Drew type books published in the US today are not truly honorable books.
Catherine Janofsky “I loved A Little Princess and Heidi. I wanted to be an orphan so badly. I read mostly ancient history and Greek mythology if I weren’t reading LMA or LIW. Set the scene for my goal as an archaeologist. What is an honorable book? And why should we look at books and judge them through modern eyes? I think discussion is more valid than condemnation. I am not a revisionist nor feminist, so views I don’t share don’t upset me.”
Me: These are pernicious points of view today so it matters. Such views support kidnapping, imprisoning and selling off for adoption by white people of hispanic immigrant children. These are not obsolete issues.
Diana Birchall: That was my edition of LW too. We definitely read all the same books…
Me I am attracted to the idea of all of us around ages 10-13 reading not only the same texts, but in the same editions and now finding one another among the “billions” on face-book. Diana and I were both growing up in NYC and the bookstores did not have that great a variety of stock.
Catherine Janofsky I loved the art work in mine.
Patricia Honaker I love the illustrations on little woman’s book jacket
Ravi: “Speaking of books that have influenced me, I read a softcover children’s book when I was about 7 or 8 that I have been trying to lay my hands on for the longest time. It was a British imprint, that was available in India circa 1954,-55. The story was about two foxes who play hooky from the Dame’s School. They buy sage duck and have a picnic on the river. The sprinkle pepper over the duck and they start sneezing, atishoo, atishoo. I read that book over and over and I longed to eat sage duck.
Another book from the same time, was an American imprint. It was one of those large sized books with pictures and stories about the people in a particular town, there were policemen and others. I have lost touch with the friend from whom I borrowed it. It would be a miracle if anyone here could identify it.
–Ravi”
Judith Cheney: “Way, way back – I’m “fixin’ to be” (as we always said in my hometown) 79 in 2 months – when I was a child, I was smitten with Dorothy & Glenda in the Good in the whole Wizard of Oz series from our little library – read to us by Mama, years before I ever saw the movie (which had come & gone the year I was born – for a while). I also remember loving Betsy in Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher & Anne of Green Gables through many of those wonderful, books, & all the Little Maidss as in the Little Maid of Antietam, of Bunker Hill (etc., etc.), an American history series with a little girl playing a heroic part in each great incident. I also loved Alice & Jo & Mary Poppins & The Little Colonel. These books were all read aloud plus many more to me & my brother by Mama through the long evenings before tv. Daddy was often sitting in his chair listening & dozing along with the readings. Tucker played with tinker toys or something & I was always on the drawing & coloring the stories in my memories, which I cherish. I think those books shaped me as much as anything else in my early childhood. I knew I would have to join in your all’s conversation sooner or later. I have been enjoying it very much.
Judith”
ear Judith and all,
Glad you have joined in. Both my daughters loved those Wizard of Oz books. We had a whole set of them, not paperbacks but the old hardbacks we picked up in a second hand book store. They had the original illustrations. Both daughters read these books over and over. I read the Wizard of Oz once, perhaps before I saw the movie, but didn’t go on. The sequels were not readily available and (unlike me) my parents didn’t run out to stores to supply what they thought I might like that way.. I know Anne of the Green Gables is another of these older girls’ books (as are the Prairie House ones). I did read that Little Maids series, from the library — there was also one about twins, the twins in this period of American history and the twins in that.
We do mirror girlhoods of girls now in their 70s 🙂
I did say Izzy has said her favorite books were these Jane Langton’s: Diamond in the Window and The Fledging. She today thinks of them as American children’s classics. She probably got them out of a children’s library at her elementary school. We had a search and could not find them on her shelves.
Yes it is fun. The original meme was just show a cover and say nothing. To me that’s so hollow; it tells hardly anything plus of course covers can misproject. So a few words of why, a context, are what’s precious, the memory itself.
Ellen
I loved Little Women, The Little Princess (Sara Crewe) and the Nancy Drew series books. The Nancy Drew are not rewritten every decade, but were being rewritten as I was starting to read the series, so I began with some of the new books. It was a revelation to me that there were older versions of these stories, but when I met a girl who had the old versions, we traded off books. The older versions are terribly racist and Orientalist, but also more powerful stories than the rewrites usually, because the antagonists are much more openly threatening. What I loved about them was the way Nancy would befriend the oppressed. I especially loved the original Sign of the Twisted Candles, in which–this Catherine will appreciate–Nancy befriends the poor orphan Sadie. The threat to Sadie seems very real from her cruel guardians. I happened to be in a coffee shop with my husband about a week ago and a group of older women were meeting: one thing they discussed was Nancy Drews they had loved: The Hidden Staircase came up and The Clue of Velvet Mask. I learned things from these books. One sad aspect of children’s books, however, is that once you an adult, you can never receive them the way you do as a child. I read a Mary Poppins as an adult and enjoyed it, but it couldn’t have the same magic as it would for a child. So that is a door that closes. I am glad I was exposed to as many as I was while I could still read them as a child.
Thank you for this full and interesting remark with good insights too. One of the books I read about the Strathemeyer books (by Bobbie Ann Mason) did argue the various series are re-written on average every ten years. On average of course. I am 11 years older than you and took them out of the library; they looked like an older set so I probably read an older version, but 2 back and the ones I read were racist. Nancy did not defend the oppressed (not that I can recall). I agree a later rereading for many can never regain the power of the original but my students used to say when I asked them to reread a favorite book from childhood it could be worse. Like me (and my father over The Secret Garden) some of them were devastated to see what they had liked. OTOH, some of my students claimed the books worked the magic just as surely. This was usually the younger ones where not that many years had passed. I’ll mention not only the stories and aspects of the characters’ personalities were changed but their very looks. All the girls got thinner; the Bobbsey Twins, a Strathemeyer product dressed far more informally, roughly, not looking so dolled up and privileged. Both girls had pony tails, looked quite different. I don’t know that I’m glad about Nancy Drew or the Bobbseys or Cherry Ames (a nurse series). I wish I had had access to the kind of book that Izzy read when young: e.g, The Bridge at Terabethia. But what was, what was and I resolved to tell the truth about which books influenced me.
[…] Jane Eyre, DuMaurier’s King’s General, and Austen’s Mansfield Park); and Day 6: Alcott’s Little Women (together with Traver’s Mary Poppins in the Park, and the Nancy Drew […]
This is written in response to Diane Reynolds’s longer email in response to this blog on Womenwriters@groups.io
https://groups.io/g/WomenWriters/message/47184
I’m very impressed by this long email filled with good information and insight. I’m glad Diane put it on WomenWriters@groups.io too — where it is equally germane. First yes trying to remember more carefully: I bought most of the Strathemeyer books from a local bookstore with a children’s section. These sets were not in the drugstores. My father disliked my reading this stuff and said it was inferior and one “sign” of this was these were not found in libraries. That’s most. When we moved from the Bronx to Queens, I did find some of these sets in libraries — oddly enough these were older ones, and that’s where I found the older Bobbsey Twins, which even then shocked my by the racism. The books Judith cited (Twins in this era or that, or the Little Maid) were in the children’s section.
It was not class snobbery with my father: he thought I wasn’t learning anything. These books were just filled with unreal nonsense, said he (or words to that effect). So he’d take me to the library and read aloud classics to me — like Dickens or RLStevenson. Trying to be really candid, I think I was on the way to be racist from reading Gone with the Wind and some of these other white adolescent girl classics when young. He detested GWTW – not from the racist standpoint so much (though he said this racist pro-confederacy crap!) but as a good socialist misrepresenting the civil war. Much better to reread Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre and other English 19th century classics.
It was his idea for me to try the adult library at age 11-12 and the librarian said okay if he was there. To be clear GWTW, Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park were books I read 13-15. Little Women, Mary Poppins, Bobbsey Twins, Judy Bolton, Nancy Drew I was young 8-11/12. GWTW was a given away from the book-of-the-month club, an American company (that I now know carried Winston Graham’s Poldarks but under other names which did not bring out they were a series properly).
I’ve read only two books on these Strathemeyer and other commercial series: one I’ve thought very good; it’s feminist and thin: Bobbie Ann Mason’s Girl Sleuth. I’ve assigned it to classes. Another one of many I never finished: an uncorrected proof of Girl sleuth: Nancy Drew and the women who created her by Melanie Rehak. I couldn’t stand the Rehak because of her tone (as I recall but what were my objections I no longer remember). At any rate Mason went over several series and especially Judy Bolton (a favorite for me, with one author, not rewritten) while Rehak was about the women who wrote Nancy Drew and the Nancy Drew phenomenon. I think it would be easy to make waves because part of my objection was she was whitewashing these books. I didn’t think then about all the people still living she could offend — this was years ago I read that book.
As I recall now, when I assigned this paper to students to reread favorite books form childhood the Nancy Drew type books were different titles some of them. So probably a new book — so to speak
I never read the Donna Parker series and can see it’s about an slightly older girl than the Bobbseys and at the same time more about American life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Parker
I am glad there was an attempt to give my daughters books with somewhat more realism — with stories where families are having troubles. At least some of the books they were given to choose from.
I see Diane really remembers details from these Nancy Drew books. I don’t, nor even Judy Bolton. A few titles. What I do remember a bit more precisely are the stories from Mary Poppins. And what I really do remember a great deal of is from Little Women and Good Wives. That’s why I put that one first.
There are British equivalents for British girls; like Sue Barton for Cherry Ames — those books stirred me to want to be a nurse. My father discouraged that. This story is intertwined with memories of my father and his influence …
Ellen
[…] May Alcott’s Little Women (6), along with P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins in the Park, and the Nancy Drew […]
[…] will end the matter of Little Women with an interview of Gerwig by Gabrielle Donnelly. For her too (LW is my sxith of ten most influential books) this is a seminal book, one she can hardly remember not knowing, so often and so far back has she […]