Good Wives

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 was born in Pennsylvania in 1832, the second of four daughters. Little Women, loosely based on her own experiences, was published in 1868 and was an immediate success. In her later years Alcott became involved with the women's suffrage movement. She published her last novel, Jo's Boys in 1886, and died in Boston on 6th March 1888 at the age of fifty-six.