(no subject)

[whirligigwitch]

The cake that will become, upon decoration, whirlywitchette's birthday cake is in the oven right now. It looks like it will become a hedgehog, complete with chocolate buttons for spines. Her birthday present has been purchased and she received an advance in the form of a Thomas the Tank Engine book she spotted in Wilkinsons. I'm taking a break from the warm kitchen before going to prepare tonight's dinner which is Beef and Guinness casserole.

Last night I started to read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I'm not sure what age I was when I first read it, though I know I had two copies, one abridged and one full version. It seems to be that I would have been about 8 when I first read the abridged version. It strikes me as interesting that this copy I am reading, the Penguin Classics version of 1989, contains what I knew as a child as the sequel Good Wives as well as the full Little Women. It seems that in the US Good Wives was just part 2, published about a year later, but in Europe was published as a separate book under a title the author of the introduction thinks Alcott would have hated. It solves a minor mystery that I had forgotten about. Watching Friends one year at university, I can remember an episode in whch Joey is reading Little Women. Somehow he finds out before the fact that Beth dies - this led to much dicussion amongst thos of us watching as no one remembered her dying. I was sure it was in the sequel, but if the sequel is part of the book in the US, it explains it.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Heh. This was the basis of a useful trick question for (British-based) quizzes for many years. ;-) You have to be a little careful about the wording, of course.

[red-ruby.livejournal.com]

I was sure it was in the sequel, but if the sequel is part of the book in the US, it explains it.

Yes, and it also explains how I ended up with an extra "half a book" when I decided to catch up on my Alcott reading. :-) I ordered copies of all the books I didn't have, which included Good Wives. (Which I indeed had read a bunch of times as the 'second half' of Little Women without knowing it, of course).

[k425.livejournal.com]

I'm confused. My mum has two separate books - LW, in which Beth dies, and GW, in which everyone else gets married.Where was B's death in the US version?

Actually, mum's got three books, the third is Little Men. There's a fourth, that I can't remember the name of, that I have managed to get from a library, once. And then there's Jack and Jill but I don't know anyone who's actually read that.

Oh, no, let me think! bopeepsheep probably has...

[whirligigwitch.livejournal.com]

Beth doesn't die in the first part of Little Women, which in the versions I had as child was just called LW. She died in Good Wives, a few years after Meg gets married but I think before Jo or Amy marry. But in the US editions, that's Little Women Part 2 as it's all the same book.

I had LW, a very old copy of Good Wives, Little Men and Jo's Boys. JB is another very old copy, acquired at a Sale of Work, but it's an abridged version, alas. I also owned Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, in new paperback copies. They are all still at my parents' house.

[k425.livejournal.com]

That's the one, Jo's Boys. Perhaps it's time to look at ebay...

I'm probably confused about the timelines, it's a while since I read LW and GW. The copies I read are 30s or 40s prints. V precious!