The First Girls' Story

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 84, 31 January 1941, Page 5

The First Girls' Story

O you sometimes take down from your bookshelves a battered volume so dear to you in your girlhood that you have not been able to part with it since? You remember so well how you loved it, how you cried over parts of it, and enjoyed crying over it. Perhaps the book has been passed on to your own daughter who enjoys it as much as you did yourself. If you do sometimes turn back the pages of the past in this way, I can be pretty sure that one of the books you look into is " Little Women" by the American authoress, Louisa M. Alcott. It is an evergreen book. Girls loved it when it first appeared in 1868, and I can testify that they love it just as much to-day. "Little Women" was a pioneer in its line. Before it

appeared there were really no books for girls according to our standards. A Boston publisher asked Miss Alcott to write such a book but when he saw the manuscript it wasn’t what he expected and he demurred about publishing it. But he was a sensible man, and he reflected

that perhaps he, a bachelor getting on in years, was not the best judge of what was needed. So he " Tried it on the dog "-the dog in this case being a niece and some other. girls. They were of different families and they read the story without reference to one another; but they agreed in their boundless enthusiasm for the book and begged him to publish it. And, like every proper uncle, he agreed to oblige his niece, and the other

young ladies.-

-("A few minutes with Women Nov-

elists" No. 10, by

Margaret

Johnston

2YA; January

18.