Little Women at 150 ed. by Daniel Shealy (review).

Reflecting on Alcott's humiliating experience with reviewers' jibes at the Emersonian ideals she unwittingly showcased in I Moods i , Trites asserts that Alcott determined to hide her Emersonian worldview in I Little Women i beneath a more widely accepted author's well-known text, John Bunyan's I The Pilgrim's Progress i . It could usefully supplement an Alcott seminar at the graduate level, offer rich and accessible essays for undergraduate teaching, fuel further Alcott research, and enrich teaching and scholarship in not only children's literature but cultural studies, gender studies, history, American and transatlantic studies, and book history. Transcendentalism forms the backdrop for both Roberta Seelinger Trites's essay, "Louisa May Alcott's Emersonian Use of I The Pilgrim's Progress: Little Women i as Palimpsest", and Doyle's essay, which analyzes I Little Women's i practical application of Margaret Fuller's views on three types of successful marriage. Doyle likewise looks primarily at the novel's closing chapters to match the marriages in I Little Women i to three types of successively egalitarian marriages described in Margaret Fuller's influential essay, "The Great Lawsuit", which Fuller expanded from its 1843 appearance in I The Dial i into the 1845 book I Woman in the Nineteenth Century i . [Extracted from the article]