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[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.