I've always sort of wondered what I wasn't getting about "Little Women."
I'm pretty sure I read it in school, though I would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene. I know I saw at least part of the 1994 film - the one with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes and Christian Bale - but I remember walking out of the room midway through and never returning, much to my mother's dismay.
Nothing about the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott's perennial best seller particularly stuck with me, and as an adult, annoyance overshadowed apathy as I tried to understand how the literary heroine of so many women I admired - the spunky, independent writer Jo March - would, by the end of the novel, relinquish her art for marriage, and then proclaim that she is the happiest she'd ever been.
