Little Women: N M Browne

It must be forty years since I last read Little Women and its sequels. Perhaps it's longer. I have no

clear picture of where or when I first encountered Jo only that I did.  I cried over Beth, of course, and was briefly guilted by Marmee's virtue and ashamed that I had never given away my breakfast to someone else that needed it. But it was Jo that inspired me (along with every other female writer of my vintage that I have ever met.) I was a little bit worried that I lacked her spirit. I was never a tom boy and though, of course, I was in love with Laurie, there was no equivalent in my life. I was not Jo in any real way except in my awkwardness, but I wanted to do what she did: I wanted to write. Looking back I wonder if rather than that being a point of contact between us, the fictional Jo and the half invented Nicky, that I wanted to write because that was how I could be Jo. Surely I am not that shallow, on the other hand...
 I have often scoffed at the idea that to be something you have to see it first. I have always loved reading and I loved writing stories at school and making things up, but honestly don't know if I would have thought of writing as a serious, money earning thing without Jo's ambition. Watching the latest film version of the novel last night, brought home to me how much she mattered to me. I loved the final scene of the film in which her book is type set, printed and bound almost more than any other. I don't remember reading Jo's first response to criticism of her writing, but it is so like my own that I wonder if she was my secret model for that too.
The film, much as I enjoyed it, was not the book I read as a child. That book with its pious lessons (largely stripped from the film) and its attitude to womanhood was internalised long ago, as much a part of my childhood as roast dinners and hot doughnuts at the beach. I'm not saying its healthy to have nineteenth century mores running in your head, but it is perhaps unavoidable: Jo March was a woman of her time and her influence is not wholly benign, though a least I no longer say 'Christopher Columbus' even in my head.
Jo was not the only one, of course, other books featured women writers, Joey of the Chalet Girls who had a vast family and still wrote stories provided another subconscious model. I wanted to be Katy and Anne too: the one responsible for a phobia of swings, the other for my desire, (occasionally attained) for red hair.  We are what we read, especially what we read when we are young. It is perhaps truer than I thought that we need to see it to be it. For writers that is a disconcerting  responsibility. As we stand on the brink of a new and slightly terrifying decade, may we discharge it well.