![]() I’d first read Little Women in middle school, around the same time as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and We Capture the Castle - stories of young women relying on hidden reserves of inner strength to become something more than wives. It was, in a word, ideal, a three-dimensional rendering of my childhood fantasies. But the interior - room after room - exactly what I had pictured. Like most historic residences, Orchard House was far closer to the road than I’d imagined, and the vegetation surrounding its deep-brown clapboard exterior more sparse. Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House beckoned as well - the site of my imaginings of life as an Alcott sister, wrapped cozily in a hand-knit blanket, paging through dramatic tales, gazing out the window at swirling snow from the security of my happy home. I needed, at least once in my life, to dip my toes into Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. On a research trip to Harvard several years ago, I insisted on tacking on a daylong detour to Concord, Massachusetts. ![]() The 1933 film adaptation of Little Women. ![]()
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