06 August, 2006

What Louisa May Alcott was reading

In her journals, in 1852, Louisa May Alcott made a note to herself: "Make a resolution to read fewer novels, and those only of the best."


This is her list of books that she liked-



Carlyle's French Revolution, and his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (also Carlyle)
Goethe's Poems, Plays and novels
Plutarch's Lives
Madame Guyon
John Milton's Paradise Lost and Comus
Schiller's Plays
Madame de Staël - (author and friend of Goethe's)
Bettine
Louis XIV
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Hypatia by Charles Kingsley

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Emerson's Poems

3 comments:

Katie said...

Oh yay! Thank you! She liked Jane Eyre. Of course she did. ;o)

Katie

Mama Squirrel said...

I would have thought she liked The Heir of Redclyffe, since she had Jo crying over it up on the attic. Maybe Jo's taste, not hers?

tootlepip said...

That is quite a list.