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Geraldine Brooks: Jo March
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Geraldine Brooks is the author of two novels: March (Viking, 2005), which imagines a year at war for the absent father in Louisa May Alcott´s Little Women, and Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (Viking, 2001). In addition, she has published two works of nonfiction: Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Knopf, 1995) and Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal´s Journey from Down Under to All Over (Doubleday, 1998). Brooks ... contributes occasionally to publications such as the New Yorker.
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Geraldine Brooks takes a very minor character from Louisa May Alcott's LITTLE WOMEN--Mr. March, the girls' preacher father--and makes him the main character in this Civil War novel, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Serving as a chaplain with the Union army, March becomes a teacher on a plantation, where he meets up with Grace, a woman slave he knew years ago. Tormented by the scenes of cruelty and suffering he witnesses--and the casual racism of nearly everyone he encounters--March struggles to keep his ideals intact. Brooks based her vibrant and well-researched portrait of March partly on Bronson Alcott, the New England transcendentalist and father of Louisa May.
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In this beautiful novel, Geraldine Brooks breathes life into Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. As March is largely absent from Alcott's story, it is Brooks who truly introduces us to this character whom we follow from his youthful days as a peddler in the south to his post as a Union chaplain in the Civil War — first ministering to soldiers and later as the teacher at a contraband farm. Self-taught scholar, passionate abolitionist, and unorthodox clergyman, March is modeled on Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, with inspiration drawn from his own papers, as well as those of friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
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In her afterword to March, Geraldine Brooks apologises to husband Tony Horwitz for her years of indifference to his civil war obsessions (well documented in his outstanding Confederates in the Attic). The apology is appropriate, because with March, Brooks has not only joined the ranks of Civil War nuts, but with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction under her belt, it just might be the making of her as a novelist.
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March is Geraldine Brooks' imagining of the life of John March, the absent father of the March girls from Little Women. Since most of the characters in Little Women were based on Louisa May Alcott's family, Geraldine Brooks bases John March on her father, Bronson Alcott. In March, John March is an anti-slavery idealist and contemporary of Emerson and Thoreau. Although, he's opposed to war, he enlists as a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War, but he finds the common soldier lacks his abolitionist fervor. His pontification make the soldiers uncomfortable. The realities of war and human weaknesses collide with his idealistic principles, rendering a good man ineffective when he's most needed.
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Brooks artfully weaves through time in her first person narrative, told mostly from March's point of view. Her style evokes the best of nineteenth century writing while remaining eminently readable. She based some of Mr. March's character on Bronson Alcott, an educator and radical and father of Louisa. Alcott family friends like the Emersons and the Thoreaus are ... acquaintances of the Marchs. This may not all fit perfectly with the story told in
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Jo March