DURING THAT SUMMER

SUMMER and literature are perfect for each other! We save books through the year to read in the summer, while reading and media websites have tips for our summer-reading and for reading on the beach. 

Yet summer can be a literary protagonist too! For me, one great literary summer is in Louisa May Alcott's Good Wives, a book I read when I was seven years old.

During that summer, both Amy March and Laurie Lawrence travel to Europe separately; [SPOILER alert] they have common friends, meet up and fall in love. Amy manages to make Laurie get over his desperate love for her sister, the formidable Joe March.

To me, Good Wives is one of those books which opened my horizons to a world which existed beyond my own, very limited, world -- a world of poetry, imagination and art. I preferred, then as I do now, Amy March's concern with art, beauty and fashion to Joe March's graver concerns!

During that summer in Europe, both Amy and Laurie are unhappy, but then find happiness together, and return to the US as an engaged couple. And Alcott makes clear that happiness is entirely their making -- Amy speaks up and tells Laurie some unwelcome truths, while he becomes determined to heal his broken heart!

More on literary summers in later posts!