Red Flags in Laurie's Proposal: This was Unexpected #Shorts

Why Jo and Laurie don´t end up together:

Say Hi on Social:

My artist accounts:

The text, it says "A woman in a lonely home hearing like a sad refrain. Be worthy of love, and love will come in the falling of summer rain". The earlier version reads: a woman musing here alone hearing ever her life's refrain, labour and love, but make no moan in the drop of summer rain.

During the time of writing, and carefully estimated perhaps when writing Little Women, this idea of being a literal spinster with a pen as a spouse, Was not very tempting. Louisa makes, the divide between author and narrator to claim herself problematically as a character as the Lu to whom she has given a version of her own name in this earlier rendering of the poem and this woman's faith differs from that of Jo´s. No love waits for her except the love that she must give. Second, only to labour neither, which it seems can make her happy. Many of Alcott´s scholars believe that Louuisa fell in love at least twice. When a person destroys their journals, that usually means that they wish to hide something. Louisa was very careful to protect her reputation, almost paranoid about it.

When Louisa was in her early twenties, she considered marrying money and she had way more suitors than Jo March ever had, but her mother reminded her that love was more important. How many modern readers can imagine Jo even considering marrying for money?

Louisa is not Jo. Jo is fiction. If Louisa would have married later in life, she would have married for love. Based on the little that we know about her love life, it would seem that she was either cheated by love or that the person she loved had passed away. Family friend Julian Hawthorn wonders in his 1922 essay, "Louisa May Alcott, the woman who wrote Little Women" "Did she ever have a love affair? We never knew yet. How could a nature so imaginative, romantic, and passionate escape it?

One of the Little Women fans who I chatted with said that if Friedrich is based on someone who Louisa truly loved, that would explain why she was frustrated by the little girls who were demanding her to marry off Jo to Laurie. In April 1868, around the time when Louisa had been asked by Niles to write a novel for girls, she published an article called "Happy Women".

"If love comes as it should come accept in God's name and be worthy of his best blessing. If it never comes in God's name, reject the shadow of it. For it can never satisfy a hungry heart".

Here is part of Jo´s and Friedrich's conversation:

"I read that and I think to myself, she has a sorrow. She is lonely. She would find comfort in true love. I have a heart full of love. Full for her. Shall I not go and say, if this is not too poor a thing to give, for what I shall hope to receive, take it in God's name. I have nothing to give but my heart, which is so full, and these empty hands".

In November 1868 when Louisa began writing part two, she clearly made up her mind "Girls ask who the Little Women marry as if that was the only meaning of woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone". Little Women becomes a different type of marriage novel. One for the modern woman in the 19th century.