I love, love, loved this book when I was young. In seventh grade three of my friends and I performed a skit with a scene from Little Women for English class. I was thrilled because I got to play Beth. I thought it was terribly romantic to die of scarlet fever, especially when you’re the perfect one who never does anything wrong.

When I was in eighth grade we moved to Boston. My father’s office was near a really big Salvation Army thrift store. It had a whole room full of books for fifty cents or a quarter. I think he often went there on his lunch break and when he came home in the evening he brought me back treasures. Among them were a 1924 edition of Little Women, a six book set of Louisa May Alcott books including Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys and Invincible Louisa, and a biography of Lousia May Alcott written by Cornelia Meigs and dated 1933.