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 so...