Four Names, Four Ledgers
Four names, four ledgers.
Spoilers first. This is a full summary of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, with every marriage and every death, so skip ahead if you have not read it yet. The text I read is the Project Gutenberg ebook, number thirty-seven thousand one hundred six. It holds both halves of the story, Part First and Part Second, forty-seven chapters in all.
Here is the story in one breath. Meg marries a poor man. Jo turns down Laurie and marries a German professor. Beth dies. Amy marries Laurie. What I wanted to know is what each sister wanted, what she got, and what she gave up. The book keeps those accounts itself, because near the end Jo publishes a poem about four little chests, one for each sister. We will get there.
Four Complaints, Four Castles
Part One opens on Christmas Eve with four complaints. Jo, lying on the rug, says Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents. Meg says it is so dreadful to be poor. Amy says it isn’t fair that some girls have plenty of pretty things. Only Beth says they have each other.
Then each sister names a burden. Meg is sixteen and hates teaching. Jo is fifteen and wishes she were a boy, so she could fight beside Father, who is away with the army as a chaplain. Beth is thirteen, shy, and wants new music. Amy wants drawing pencils.
The real opening balance comes in chapter thirteen. The sisters and Laurie, the boy next door, lie on a hill and describe their castles in the air. Meg wants a lovely house full of luxurious things and heaps of money. Jo wants rooms piled with books and fame. Beth wants to stay at home, safe with Father and Mother. Amy wants to be an artist and go to Rome. Laurie wants music in Germany.
Those are the first lines in four ledgers. Everything after is the book telling us what each castle cost.
The Fever
In chapter fifteen a telegram arrives. Father is very ill in Washington, and Mother has to go. Money is short, so Jo sells her long hair, the one beauty the book gave her in chapter one, and puts twenty-five dollars in front of her mother.
While Mother is away, Beth carries food to the poor Hummel family, holds their sick baby as it dies, and catches scarlet fever. Amy is sent to Aunt March so she won’t catch it. There she writes a joking will, and leaves her father a hundred dollars of her own.
On the first of December the doctor says Mother had better be sent for. Jo cries to Laurie that Beth is her conscience. Laurie, it turns out, has already telegraphed Mother. That night Meg and Jo each promise to be better if Beth is spared, and the fever turns. The doctor says the little girl will pull through this time.
Remember those last two words. At Christmas Father comes home, and Beth runs into his arms in her little red wrapper. She has been given back for now.
Meg: Tired of Being Poor
Meg’s ledger comes first in Part Two, three years on. In chapter twenty-three John Brooke, Laurie’s tutor, asks her to marry him. Aunt March says that if Meg takes him, not one penny of her money will ever go to her. Meg, who once said it was so dreadful to be poor, chooses John anyway.
Her castle had heaps of money in it. Her real house is a small one called the Dove-cote. The wedding is at home, with no wine on the table, because their mother does not offer it to young men.
Then comes chapter twenty-eight. Meg spends fifty dollars on a silk dress, and John quietly cancels his new great-coat because he can’t afford it. In a bad moment she says she is tired of being poor. She is sorry the instant it is out. She puts her pride in her pocket, asks her friend Sallie Moffat to take the silk, and gets the coat ordered again. Then the twins, Daisy and Demi, arrive.
In my reading, Meg wanted comfort, got love, and pays for it in small coins. She also fades from the page. Her name appears five hundred thirteen times in Part One and only one hundred seventy-five in Part Two.
Jo: The Price of a Story
Jo’s ledger is the longest. In chapter twenty-seven she writes a sensation story for a newspaper prize, wins a hundred dollars, and spends it on sending Mother and Beth to the seaside. A novel later sells for three hundred.
In chapter thirty-two she decides that Beth must love Laurie, so Jo goes to New York as a governess, to get out of the way. There she meets Professor Bhaer, a German teacher. She mends his socks, and he pays the debt with German lessons. She sells sensation stories for twenty-five to thirty dollars each and hides it from home.
Then she decides the stories are trash. She burns them, but keeps the money for her time. In chapter thirty-five Laurie graduates, walks her to a stile, and proposes. Jo says, I can’t say yes truly, so I won’t say it at all. Laurie leaves for Europe with his grandfather.
So Jo has spent her hair, her stories and her best friend’s hope. In my reading, she is still the sister the book follows most. She is the most named sister in twenty-seven of forty-seven chapters.
Beth: The Tide
Beth’s ledger is the shortest and the hardest. When Jo comes home, she sees a change in her sister, a thin, transparent look. Jo offers her savings for a trip to the mountains. Beth asks for the seashore, closer to home.
On the beach, Beth tells Jo she has known for a while that she will not get well. It’s like the tide, she says. When it turns, it goes slowly. She never made plans, never thought of marrying. She says the hard part is leaving them all. She asks Jo to stand by their parents.
Chapter forty is Beth’s last year. The family gathers everything she loves in one sunny room. She makes mittens, needle-books and pen-wipers for the school children who pass her window. One night she finds Jo’s poem My Beth in her old copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, and asks Jo, have I been all that to you? She tells Jo to take her place. In the dark hour before dawn, in spring, she dies, quietly.
By my count that chapter is two thousand seventy-seven words, the second shortest of the forty-seven. And Beth is the most named sister in only four chapters. This is one of them.
Amy: I Hate Poverty
Amy’s ledger starts in chapter thirty, when Aunt Carrol invites Amy to Europe, not Jo. Amy says the trip will decide her career, and Jo tells her she will marry a rich man. From Europe Amy writes home: I may be mercenary, but I hate poverty. One of us must marry well, she says. Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet.
On Christmas Day in Nice, Amy meets Laurie again, now drifting and idle. In chapter thirty-nine she lectures him. Well, I despise you, she says. She tells him he has wasted time and money. Then she admits she has given up art, because talent isn’t genius and she wants to be great or nothing.
Laurie goes to Vienna, writes an opera, and tears it up. He writes Jo again, and Jo says no again. Amy, meanwhile, turns down Fred Vaughn, the rich man she had planned on.
News of Beth’s death reaches Amy at Vevay. Laurie comes. She runs to him: I knew you’d come to me. He proposes in a rowboat, in a few blunt words. They marry quietly in Paris, because even in their happiness they did not forget dear little Beth. In my reading, Amy gave up the career and the fortune she planned on, and got Laurie.
Jo and the Umbrella
Back home, grief teaches Jo to be useful. At her mother’s urging she writes a plain little story, and this time it is paid for and praised. When she is almost twenty-five, Laurie and Amy come home married, and Professor Bhaer arrives.
In chapter forty-six it rains. Jo is out running her mother’s errands, and the Professor finds her under his old blue umbrella. He is going west to a college post, and he is poor. When he asks, Heart’s dearest, why do you cry, she says, because you are going away. He had found her poem In the Garret in a paper, and it called him.
That poem is the ledger. Four little chests, four keys, four names on four lids. Meg’s holds a bridal gown and a baby shoe. Jo’s holds half-written poems and torn schoolbooks. Beth’s lid is always dusted. Amy’s has a knight and her name in gold and blue.
Then Aunt March dies and leaves Plumfield to Jo. Jo says, boys, I want to open a school for little lads. Five years later, at the apple picking, the sisters look back at their castles. Meg’s came most nearly true. Jo says the life she wanted then now seems selfish and lonely. Amy plans a marble figure of her frail little daughter, named Beth.
What the Count Says
Here is what I counted in the text, from chapter one to the end. Whole-word name counts: Jo, one thousand three hundred sixty-nine. Meg, six hundred eighty-eight. Amy, six hundred fifty-three. Beth, four hundred seventy-three. Jo is the most named sister in twenty-seven chapters, Meg and Amy in eight each, Beth in four.
The motifs shift too. Christmas appears thirty-nine times, thirty in Part One and only nine in Part Two. The word letter or letters appears ninety-eight times. Part Two has the travel and the marriages, and much less of the winter kitchen.
In my reading, nobody gets her first castle. Meg gets a smaller one, Amy trades art for a husband, Jo gets a school full of boys instead of fame, and Beth never leaves home. That is an opinion, and you can argue it either way.
If you want to read it yourself, the Project Gutenberg text is free. Subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments which sister’s ledger you would keep. The full guide is on book explained dot com, and the link is in the description.
