March

In Little Women the father is away at the war and barely present. Brooks gives him the book. John March is a chaplain with the Union army, an idealistic abolitionist and vegetarian who made and lost a fortune as a pedlar in the South before the war, and who has left his wife and four daughters in Concord to serve a cause he believes in absolutely.

What he finds destroys most of that. He is assigned to a plantation leased to a northern speculator and growing cotton with the same labour under a new name. He encounters again a woman he knew twenty years earlier, and the reader learns what he has never told Marmee. He is present at Ball's Bluff, and at a massacre, and he behaves in ways he cannot report home.

The woman is Grace Clement, enslaved in the house where March first stayed as a young pedlar, who could read and taught him what he had refused to see. She reappears as a nurse in a Washington hospital where March, felled by fever, is finally caught up with by his wife.

That final section switches to Marmee's voice, and the whole marriage is reframed by a woman who has been managing her husband's idealism at close range for two decades and is very tired of paying for it.

Brooks built March partly from the journals of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's father, and the historical detail is exact down to the rations and the field hospital procedures. It is short, swift and much harder edged than its source. Best for readers who love Little Women, and equally for readers who have never opened it.