March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published in 2006, has as its main character the absent husband and father from the beloved classic novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott that was first published 138 years earlier, in 1868.
Written in first person in the voice of Robert March, the story begins by recalling when he was a single young man from the North peddling assorted goods to people in the South. He stops at a plantation and is given lodging as a guest. He meets Grace, an extraordinary young black woman who is educated, unusual at a time when it is illegal to teach a slave to read.
Years later March, now forty years old, a scholar and minister, returns to the South as an Army chaplain to aid the Union cause in the Civil War, leaving his wife and four daughters behind. He stays at a plantation that has been ravaged by Union soldiers, the once lovely home trashed, crops burned, livestock and tools confiscated, leaving owners and the now freed slaves without adequate resources to make their livelihood.
Although it is now legal to teach Negroes to read, March finds resistance among many in the South. Nevertheless, he endeavors to educate those on the plantation where he stays, carving out letters in the dirt, sharing with the former slaves his meager supplies and food. During this time he writes letters to his beloved family, which is consistent with the previous novel, Little Women. March again comes into contact with Grace under very different circumstances.
March is a remarkable novel, steeped in the details of another time. War is always ugly, but even though the concept of emancipation was honorable, the means of obtaining it often caused hardship to those it was meant to save. The novel is beautifully written with descriptive passages: “The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting.” I loved this story and am impressed with the concept of a story continuing from another, a classic, written so long ago.
Thank you for this wonderful review, Mary!
You’re welcome, Carmen. I thought the premise of this was so clever, writing a continuation of a fictitious character of 138 years earlier.