Sister Acts

Tots to Teens, Star Mag

20th August 2006

Sister acts

Byline: Daphne Lee

AFTER mentioning Jo March in this column last week, I thought I would indulge in a long-overdue re-read of Little Women (LW). I had watched the DVD the week before and, as usual, was terribly put out by Jo’s refusal to marry Laurie.

I know I’m not the only Jo March fan who wishes she’d throw caution and good sense to the four winds and marry Laurie. Would it be such a disaster, really? So what if they both have foul tempers? If they quarrel they could always kiss and make-up.

To add insult to injury, the idiot boy then goes off to Europe and marries Amy! It’s so obvious that Laurie is on the rebound and it’s so shaming for all concerned! He is just so desperate to be part of the March family, it’s pathetic.

Amy should have sent him packing, but I guess plenty of money and a fine mansion just a hop, skip and jump away from Marmee is more than she is capable of turning down.

When I was little, I just hated the idea of Goldilocks getting Laurie. I disliked her airs and graces. I thought she was ridiculous. I am the youngest of four sisters and used to get so peeved that Amy was my counterpart, so to speak. My second sister Beatrice was Jo and she didn’t even like to read – oh, the injustice!

I am quite fond of Amy now. She’s a funny little girl (her malapropisms are wonderful – especially when she calls Laurie a “perfect cyclops”!), a little self-absorbed maybe, but this later translates into self-confidence.

Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a comfy life. Goodness knows I wouldn’t say no to a husband with pots of money and a grand home in New England!

However, I still want Jo to marry Laurie. I found her rejection of him so hard to bear that when I came to the end of LW early this week, I decided to give Good Wives a miss. Instead, I read A Different Road, a piece of fan fiction someone sent me a few years ago, in which Jo and Laurie end up together. You can find it on the Net at www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/11/adifferent.html. Read and be comforted!

Next, I am planning to read a (fairly) recent book about another set of four sisters: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (the winner of last year’s National Book Awards for Young People’s Literature).

I enjoy reading about female siblings – the family dynamics are always intriguing and illuminating! Austen’s Bennets and Dashwoods; Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt’s several rather antagonistic pairs – probably mirroring their own uneasy relationship as half-sisters; Hilary McKay’s beautiful Cassons – Cadmium Gold, Saffron and Permanent Rose, as colourful and brilliant as their names.

And my favourites: The Melling sisters in Diana Wynne Jones’s The Time of the Ghost. Cart, Imogen, Saly and Fenella impress, inspire and thrill me to bits.

They are heroes and anti-heroes – subversive, anarchic, melodramatic, romantic, reckless, eccentric. I frequently wish I could be like one of them. Then, unlike Amy, I would not need a husband with pots of money because I would have plenty of my own.