From BabyLit to Lusty Little Women: Age, Race, and Sexuality in Recent Little Women Spinoffs

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jade Werner for suggesting fruitful leads, likewise Anne Phillips and Greg Eiselein, and Anne Rioux in her Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy. I am also grateful to Jade, Roger Clark, and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful responses to drafts.

Notes

¹ See Spengler 20, 59, 101, 443.

² Other recent graphic novels include Grady Hendrix and Ryan Dunlavey’s acerbic Little Women (2016) and Dani Jones’s Little Women (2017).

³ Critics have underscored such subtextual readings since at least Schorer (1949).

⁴ See Clark, Afterlife 58–70, 176–86. My count does not include short pieces, abridgments, or books that merely invoke Little Women. For more on its spinoffs, see Rioux 128–32.

⁵ See Clark, Kiddie Lit 48–76. Nevertheless, the audience for Alcott spinoffs is fluid, thanks in part to crossover publishing in recent years and the rise in the upper age limit of the young adult category from 18 to 21 or 25 or more (see, e.g., Cart 111–21).

⁶ The reviewer for the Hindustan Times, however, critiques the focalizing of Laurie, which subordinates the women characters to “yet another rich man’s existential crisis” (Mehta para. 7). In this respect Hasin’s novel echoes Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993), in which external male presences—a narratorial “we”—are bemused by the puzzling suicides of five sisters.

⁷ To cite the title of Ashcroft et al.’s influential work.

⁸ For elucidation of the erotic potential in this scene, see Daly-Galeano elsewhere in this issue.

⁹ At least not in this book. Marmee and Mr. Laurence’s romance does resurface in Pearl’s sequel, Lusty Little Men (2014). Contrary to the promise of the title, we observe the couplings of the grown-up March sisters (conjugal couplings, spiced with a little bondage), not the erotic escapades of the “little men” who attend Jo and Bhaer’s school at Plumfield. And certainly not of the little men with one another.

¹⁰ Unlike several earlier drama spinoffs—see Clark, Afterlife 176. Otherwise, aside from brief tokens in Moran and Todd, there’s only Terciero and Indigo’s graphic novel.

¹¹ A third spinoff set in the nineteenth century is Trix Wilkins’s The Courtship of Jo March: A Variation of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (2016). Following fanfiction precepts, it exploits a trope frequent in fanfiction of Little Women: Jo marries Laurie (see Rizzuto 206). It largely reinforces popular shortcuts, rather than contradicting or querying them.

¹² For insight into the racial politics of Alcott’s novel, see Alberghene. For discussion of how an experimental school that Alcott’s father had created failed after he admitted a black student in 1839, see Matteson 84.

¹³ See Clark, Afterlife, especially 42–48.

¹⁴ For listings of figures who have found Alcott’s text significant, see Rioux 121–28; Clark, Afterlife 48, 107, 141. The one novelist whom I examine in this article and who would seem to have responded not just through an “anxiety of authorship” but with a more Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” killing the text, is a novelist of color.