Though it may surprise many who assume they know me well, I am a romantic at heart; whether I was already that way before reading Little Women, or whether Ms. Alcott’s tome guided me to this trajectory I do not know.

What I do know is, I still remember the exact day I read Little Women for the first time. I was in seventh grade, just turned twelve. I read the book sprawled on my orange and yellow and brown patchwork bedspread, or tilted back to a dangerous degree in the nubby yellow corduroy rocking chair, feet braced on the wobbly end table with reading lamp.

I read in Dad’s Lazy-Boy Recliner, after he had gone to bed, and sometimes on the top step of the basement steps, or the back porch if the concrete was warmed from the sun. Often I read at night in bed, sometimes with a flashlight under the covers but more often propped up on my right elbow, the page illuminated by the streetlight shining in my bedroom window.

I immediately developed a love/hate relationship with that book. I loved most of it, but I hated one specific part of it – a big part of it, a *central* part of it.

I often forget the names of the authors of books (o, irony), but in this case, I flipped to the frontispiece of the book to burn the name Louisa May Alcott forever into my memory, under the heading “On My Sh*t List Forever”. Because how could any right thinking writer imagine characters like Laurie and Jo into being, and then keep them apart? How? They were so clearly made for each other!

Yet instead of falling passionately into one another’s arms, and spending the next 50 years having crazy hot sex and arguments featuring flying crockery and raised voices and heaving bosoms and amused forbearance and crazy hot make up sex, we the readers are asked to accept Jo’s “wisdom”, confirmed by Laurie’s out of touch geezer grandfather, that she and Laurie are too much alike to be truly happy together.

After Jo turns Laurie down he proves the depth of his love by the depth of his depression which everyone confuses with maturity and approves of. Passion tamed by rejection, Laurie finds solace in the lowered expectations of a marriage with the beautiful but insipid Amy, (who always got what she wanted) while Jo gets stuck with crotchety old German Professor Baher, aka Grody Old Graybeard, much to the indignation of my 12 year old romantic’s heart.

Do not evoke the movie for me – the movie director, like every one else on the planet, loved Jo and wanted her to be with Laurie too, and so felt compelled to cast young virile good looking Gabriel Byrne as the Professor, the better to rationalize that Jo did not get the short old gray end of the stick that Alcott dealt her.

So don’t tell me about the movie, b/c the movie is not reflecting who the Professor really was, the Professor that Alcott wrote about, who was old country Germanic and probably a little portly and I think even walked with a limp and smelled of moth balls— and was most assuredly NOT deserving of Jo and most of all he was NOT LAURIE.

Laurie and Jo were my introduction to unrequited love. That same year I found Little Women in our home library, our teacher took us to see Romeo and Juliet at an afternoon matinee. The movie starred Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, who were memorably young and beautiful and spoke in Shakespearean verse, which we noticed when we weren’t embarrassed to giggles by Leonard Whiting’s partial nude scene in which we saw his bare bottom which my friends and I immediately dubbed a “Montague” (and which I privately noted with seventh grade surprise, was as smooth and hairless and pretty as a girl’s).

Of the two girls with ill-fated luck in love it was Jo’s story that I took most to heart. Juliet’s story was tragic but she was beautiful and rich and privileged. Her plight and fate were as unreal to me as her speech.

Jo, by contrast, was much more real to me. I fell in love with Jo not because she was a writer, but because she was so honest (which is what made her a good writer). The specific scene in which my love was born: when Jo cuts her hair and sells it in order to help out the family, which, with the father off to war, is near starvation. She falters before she does it, and then crushes her own vanity and does it anyway.

And when she hands the wad of cash over to her mother (Marmee dearest), and everyone wonders aloud how she came to have so much money, she pulls off her hat to reveal her shorn head, and her lovely (and somewhat vain and shallow) older sister Meg cries out “Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!” A sentiment that Jo tacitly agrees with but does not take to heart – a feat that seemed utterly impossible to my insecure 12 year old self.

I loved Jo fiercely from that moment on (and hated Meg), and I never recovered when she turned down, for no good reason that I could see, Laurie’s final impetuous request to love him, to marry him, and dance into eternity in some truly awesome silk ballgowns. I read the book over and over and Beth always wasted away, Amy always came infuriatingly into her own, and Jo never ends up with the one man that could have supported and nurtured her crazy writing talent so that it grew wild, covering their mansion with green vines and exotic tropical flowers and palm leaves big as a man’s head where birds the color of jewels spoke to startled visitors in the parlor. Jo ends up with geriatric old Mr. Germanic Graybeard.

After one of my many re-readings of Little Women, and after learning of the dorky but sometimes necessary practice of fan fiction, I immediately undertook to rewrite the ending (some wrongs just need to be (re)writed/righted), giving Jo the man she really wants, needs, and deserves. I hope Miss Alcott isn’t turning over in her grave; rather, I hope she sitting up and clapping, glad that someone finally righted the grievous wrong she did to Jo, Laurie, and Love itself.

And while I was at it, I let Beth live. A girl can dream.

Jo sat in the parlor, Laurie’s impassioned plea – could she, would she? in her hand. Her heart was racing, and to calm herself she looked about with some satisfaction. The parlor was dim; it was early evening, the quiet time before dinner preparations would begin. She could hear Marmee humming over her sewing in the upstairs garret where the light was still clear.

A tinkling at the pianoforte brought a smile to her lips; dear Beth was composing again. How good it was to see her recovering day by day! The sickness that had cast its frightening gray pall over the household was receding like so much remembered fog. Now the house was airy and light with music, and who better to author the tune of a happy, healthy future than Beth herself? Jo relished this time – after the worst but with the best still to come. She wanted to slow the days down and sip from them as if at some rich and aromatic cup.

“I suppose this is growing up,” she thought to herself. “What we long for is suddenly here, and it is only then that we realize there was beauty in the journey as well as the destination.”

She looked again at the letter in her hand, the words themselves seeming to leap from the page with all of Laurie’s impetuous energy. She had been sorely tempted to tell him that she was sorry, he would always be her dear Laurie but she decidedly couldn’t, and wouldn’t. The words of the old man had been ringing loudly in her ears – that she and Laurie were too much alike, and a household of peace could never be theirs.

But then the roses had begun to bloom again in Beth’s pale cheeks, a sight so shocking but at the same time welcome that Jo had spent the next several nights in the garret, unable to sleep, feverishly writing. Marmee and Meg had gently given her space, assuming she was simply scribbling away at another story that would provide the household with a turkey, perhaps, or a silk scarf for Marmee to wear to Easter Mass.

But for once, Jo was not scribbling a story. She was writing her thoughts down; she was, in fact, writing her thoughts into being. It had started as a letter to Laurie and ended up a letter to herself, and in it she found many surprises, doors that opened with a creak and a groan, and not least of all, Love.

You and I are so much alike, she had begun, picturing her dear boy in Venice. She saw him quite clearly in her mind’s eye; his long-lashed eyes with their lazy regard that could flare in an instant to mischief, or (she thought with a tremor) passion. She imagined him seated at a ball, his long legs, elegant in dove grey breeches, stretched carelessly before him while around him dazzlingly beautiful women circled him in their fine silks and puffed crinolines like anxious flowers. She imagined the curly forelock springing free from his pomaded hair, like a silent acknowledgement of her secret regard.

We are so much alike, she’d written. We are so much alike. And then the words came pouring forth, words she’d never dared think, words she didn’t know were even in her vocabulary, so passionate they were.

You, she wrote, savoring the word that had come to mean only one person. You. You understand me as no other has ever understood me. You alone have read my writing and understood the words as if you were reading them inscribed on my very heart. You heard my characters cry for love and knew that they spoke in a voice that is mine, and with words that would be mine if only I had the courage to speak them. You know that for me, to write is to breathe, and that the little notes I have sent you each day were tiny lifelines fluttering from my fingers to your window. You have felt my heart pound when we dance, and pretended not to know that it was the nearness of your dear face, and not our exertions, that had me so flushed. Laurie, we are so much alike, we are as one, you are my soul and my heart. I would be with you whatever the cost, however you wish. I care not for your riches, only be generous with your love. My dear, my love, I do not fear poverty or age or sickness when I think of a life with you; only silence. Let us pledge never to be silent with one another, but speak always in the language we have found together, the language of two souls in true understanding.

In a passion of impatience to know how you read these words, a torture of trembling that I have waited too long to know my own heart,

I am yours, ever,

Jo

{There. I feel much better now. }