I have a confession: I didn’t want to be Jo in Little Women. I wanted to be Beth, but she was so impossibly good that was never going to happen. So I accepted my lot in life: I was and am Meg, not the main character in the girls’ book of life, but the supportive, seemingly wiser, older touchstone. It’s the way I saw myself in life, big sister to two sisters who appeared to have a lot more going for themselves than I did.
You remember Meg, the oldest of the four March daughters, the one who remembered when the family had money and longed for the small niceties of life that that money had brought. The one who realized after time away from home with the wealthy Moffatts that kindness and integrity matter a lot more than fancy ballgowns and frizzed hair.
And as for Jo, the character inspired by author Louisa May Alcott herself? Not so much. Jo was too much of a tomboy for me. And writing, well, who honestly thought a woman could make a living as a writer? Not me.
Like many girls from a certain era, I had a thing for series, and like Little Women, many of them featured heroines who loved to write. While I enjoyed reading about them, my favorite scenes often involved the non-writing older sisters. I longed to have a lifelong friend the way Betsy Ray did in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, but I also cheered when the popular Betsy got her comeuppance in Betsy Was a Junior. The one I ached for in that book was older sister Julia, who was blackballed by a “sister” in a college sorority. I liked the practicality of Beany Malone, another writer wanna-be, in the series by Lenora Mattingly Weber. But I saw myself more as her impulsive and generous big sis Mary Fred.
Decades later, I have a deeper appreciation for Alcott, Lovelace, Weber, and all those other writers of that genre (in case you haven’t guessed, I favored Mary over Laura in the Little House series as well). But a large part of my appreciation remains their ability to create believable, flawed, loving big sisters.
