With her older sister, Emma, planning a wedding and her younger sister, Sophie, preparing to launch a career on the London stage, Lulu can’t help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut, working dead-end jobs with no romantic prospects in sight. When her mother asks her to find a cache of old family recipes in the attic of her childhood home, Lulu stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. In her letters, Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister, Meg’s, new home and family; her younger sister Amy’s many admirers; Beth’s illness and the family’s shared grief over losing her too soon; and the butterflies she feels when she meets a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives and secrets of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can the words of her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place for herself in a world so different from the one Jo knew? Vibrant, fresh, and intelligent, The Little Women Letters explores the imagined lives of Jo March’s descendants—three sisters who are both thoroughly modern and thoroughly March. As uplifting and essential as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Gabrielle Donnelly’s novel will speak to anyone who’s ever fought with a sister, fallen in love with a fabulous pair of shoes, or wondered what on earth life had in store for her.
It was a real treat for me to send along some questions for author Gabrielle Donnelly about her new book The Little Women Letters (available June 7th from Penguin). I am excited and a bit curious to see how this new story unfolds...
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Do you remember your first time reading Little Women? What is your most vivid memory/takeaway of LW as a young girl?
I adored Little Women when I was a child. I actually wanted to be one of the March sisters. They were so kind, funny, warm, and loving ... and best of all, they were all girls. I was stuck with four brothers, and from where I sat the March house looked like a pretty nice deal.
Who was your favorite character then and is it different now?
I yearned to be Jo - she was difficult, untidy, hated girly frills, and wanted to be a writer, just like me! I still love Jo of course - and she's certainly the closest to me temperamentally - but as I get older, I'm also finding myself intrigued by Amy, who is in many ways the most rounded-out character of all. She starts out with more flaws than any of the others, and it's obvious in the beginning of Little Women that Louisa May Alcott finds her thoroughly irritating. But by the end of Good Wives, she's grown into a strong, good, and likeable woman who has earned the respect of the author. It's an interesting journey.
How did you decide to write such a famous fictional character and continue the story - what was the inspiration?
A lovely and imaginative editor at Michael Joseph publishers called Lydia Newhouse had the idea of a modern young woman who happened to be Jo March's great-great-granddaughter finding a cache of her ancestor's letters, and was kind enough to commission me to carry out the writing part. I tossed around a few ideas for this - would she live in Boston, Los Angeles (where I live now), or London (where I grew up)? What would she be like? How much would she know about Jo? Would she have sisters and how much would they be like Jo's sisters? At last my main character, Lulu, formed in my head and began speaking to me - and the rest of the book fell into place from there.
What kind of research did it involve? (I recently read Harriet Riesen's LMA biography - are you familiar with Riesen and her extensive work on LMA?)
I have of course read Harriet Reisen's biography of Louisa May Alcott and many others; but for me, the best research for re-creating her world came from reading her books, which are wonderfully rich in domestic detail - I quite shamelessly plundered not only Little Women but also An Old-Fashioned Girl, Work, Rose In Bloom, and various others for descriptions of clothes, food, furniture, and how people behaved. For more specialised research - and to avoid flubs as far as I possibly could - I went to the Internet. I remember spending a whole afternoon researching gingham - I wanted to have someone wear a gingham dress, but wasn't sure if a New England girl of the social standing of the March sisters would wear that material. I did at last find a reference somewhere to someone who seemed similar to the Marches who was wearing gingham. But you never know - the girl I found might have suffered from a personality disorder which manifested itself by wearing the sort of clothes that no normal person of her time and place would dream of wearing!
As a reader, I appreciate your attention to detail and that level of research sounds overwhelming. Can you talk a little bit about the book - either the characters or any challenges with combining old & new characters.
It was a fascinating challenge to bring the Little Women characters into the modern world. My three modern sisters are more or less based on Meg, Jo and Amy - quiet little Beth would not leave the nineteenth century, so I left her there! - but there are subtle differences. The most marked of these, I think, is that the modern girls are more self-accepting than Louisa May Alcott's. Emma, unlike Meg, allows herself to enjoy pretty things without feeling too guilty; it certainly doesn't occur to Lulu that she should try to tone herself down to fit into society; and Sophie rather enjoys being the slightly spoilt youngest, and why not? The biggest challenge was Fee, the girls' mother. Marmee in Little Women was all-wise, all-knowing, and all-good. A modern reader won't buy into that, so I had to find a way to make her a fallible human being while keeping many of the Marmee qualities at the same time. A certain amount of this came from humour - Fee's daughters tease their mother, which Marmee's girls would not have dreamed of doing. I ended up having a great deal of affection for Fee.
How long did it take to research/write this story? What does your writing process look like?
This was the first book I've ever written to a deadline and it was a hideously tight one - I got the commission in late August, and the book was due in by the beginning of (rather appropriately) March. That is - quite literally - about four times as fast as I am accustomed to writing! I more or less waved good-bye to my husband, my friends, my poor garden, and any shred of good temper for the duration of the writing - impressively, the first three were still there when I came back. I'm quite pleased with the book I produced in this time, but wouldn't want to go back to that sort of deadline again. My husband has promised me faithfully that he will strangle me if I do!
Wow- that sounds stressful! Speaking of stress, are you prepared for the reaction of LW & LMA super fans, good or bad? What do you hope for readers, most of whom will be fans of the original?
This is something I had been a little nervous about - I know that some literary fans can be quite territorial about "their" author's reputation and, to be honest, had been prepared for a certain level of harumphing and "How dare you tamper with The Masterwork?" But so far, my experience so far has been overwhelmingly good. I've encountered nothing but excitement, interest, and good wishes, from everyone from the leading Louisa May Alcott experts at the Orchard House museum just outside Boston (which is a wonderful place to visit if you're in the area - check it out at louisamayalcott.org) on down. I think it makes sense that the sort of people who would be drawn to the March sisters would be a friendly bunch!
I would love to plan a trip to the Orchard House museum...someday. What are you reading right now? And what books would you recommend everyone read (besides this one, of course!)
This is an exciting time for women's fiction - there are some gorgeous books out there by some amazing new writers. I'm currently half-way through the wonderful The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I can't recommend highly enough, and have just devoured Oxygen by Carol Cassella - it's a thoroughly gripping story which is medical drama and a mystery and a family story, and it works on all levels, which is extraordinarily impressive. Then there was Sister by Rosamund Lupton, which pulls you in from the start and keeps the suspense going and the surprises coming right up until the very last paragraph, and which I found almost impossible to put down. I met a friend for tea when I was reading the last chapters - the book was in my handbag and I kept saying to my friend, "Um, don't you have to go to the loo or something ...?"
I'm adding Sister to my list - I love an engrossing read! Does you have ideas for a follow up to this...or are you working on something completely different?
I have a couple of ideas spinning around in my head which could go in either direction or neither or even into a combination of both. But for right now my most immediate plan is to go back to reading The Help - I just have to find out what happens next! See you ...
Thank you to Gabrielle for her thoughtful responses to my nosy questions! Besides looking forward to The Little Women Letters I am more motivated to read some of the Alcott books I've missed....maybe I'll add them to my floundering classics challenge. ;) Ahem.
Have a great weekend all.
The End.
