On Why Austen Rules & Alcott Drools

Being a high school girl was cray-cray-bananay, but at least there were some great books.

Melanie Jennings and I have long had an epistolary friendship. For 2025 and possibly beyond, we are letting readers eavesdrop on our bookish correspondence. Melanie’s most recent post about the perils of being vulnerable moved me and made me think. This is my response.

Dear Melanie,

In your last letter, you explained to me how you’ve always felt like the girl watching the other girls from the outside. Like, girlhood wasn’t yours by right, but a trophy on a shelf that you couldn’t reach. Or a glow from a window, except you’re standing on the street looking in.

As your friend, I feel compelled to say: that feeling that you were the wrong type of girl, that you are the wrong type of woman – it is not true! It’s a lie.

As a fellow writer, however, I see your frankness about “failing to be female” as a paradox that can drive a really, really good book. What is expected, what is taboo; what is said, what is felt; what is loathed, what is desired: I love to see how the sparks fly off this friction.

Lately, I’ve been working on a new story – about Florida, and being a teenager in the early 2000s. (By working on, I mean thinking about while I wash dishes after dinner.) I’m curious to discover who my heroine will be, what she’ll do, say, and feel. “How a girl should be” is contradictory and impossible. I hope she’ll be brave and audacious in the face of it.

When I was seventeen, I attended a private Christian high school part-time, and I took the rest of my classes at the local community college. I was audacious, but usually by accident rather than design. For example: I wrote an editorial for my high school newsletter that blasted the athletic director for ignoring the girls’ teams. (I played soccer. Captain, center midfield.) The AD didn’t call in my goals and assists to the local newspaper, a major driver of scouting interest; he didn’t make phone calls to college coaches about what I could do; he made no efforts to turn recognition – meaning, scholarships – in my direction. I’m 99% sure he never once saw me play. The same was true for every other female athlete. All effort was reserved for the boys. Win or lose, the AD had their backs and they got the money accordingly. Already, Florida was knee-deep in the recession that would soon swallow the rest of the country.

Was it okay for me to be angry? Was I angry? Where did this newsletter editorial even come from? As a teenager, I didn’t rebel against the rules so much as ignore them. I watched my real life as if it were a somewhat interesting movie, and I lived intensely and privately in my own daydreaming fog. This is part of what made my “take girls’ sports seriously” editorial a surprise, even to me; it was so grounded in questions of justice in the real world, a place I largely tolerated as a backdrop for books.

I doubt the editorial was very good. I wrote it in spite of my many private, colliding doubts: why should the athletic director care about girls’ sports when so few actual girls did? Was writing it a way of publicly declaring my undateability? Not just because of my unattractive indignation, but because it meant having to say out loud that I had failed the dainty waif test. I suspected that strong calves and finding love were mutually exclusive.

But before I could debut myself as a mannish tomboy harpy, I got censored. The librarian/newsletter editor explained that we couldn’t publish the editorial because it would open a “whole can of worms.”

I wasn’t angry at her. I was too clueless to be angry at the right things, the right people, or to know what to do about it. It was clear that the librarian’s sympathies lay with me, and that she took what I had to say even more seriously than I did.

The librarian couldn’t protect me. You can’t underestimate the fragile egos of big fish in small ponds, regardless of whether those ponds are religious or secular. For example, the principal once called me into his office and fussed at me until I cried – all because I had submitted a private (admittedly scathing) complaint about the school’s “no bad words allowed” Internet firewall. I’d been blocked trying to read Moby-Dick on Project Gutenberg. The programmer who built the firewall was so offended that he actually showed up to watch my dressing down in person! Absurd!

The librarian couldn’t protect herself, either. She had never married; there was no husband’s income to fall back on. I got the feeling that she was generally on thin ice, a Southern gothic character trying to survive a spiritual dead zone. She had only one arm, a huge, banged-up van, and a collection of her dead father’s books. I watched her slash out all his marginalia with a black marker.

Contradictions. And myself among them.

Despite the editorial, I didn’t even like playing soccer, though I didn’t know I didn’t like it, and neither did anyone else. I was in the habit of being excellent at it, and it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between what you do and what you want to do.

However, there were signs: when I had a free afternoon, I played tennis. The country club girls openly complained about playing against me because I had a weak serve, no training, the wrong shoes, and a janky racket from Sports Authority. My senior year, I won every high school match but one.

What I liked about tennis is that I had an almost Rasputin-esque control of the outcome. Tennis was a game of words, a game that I played alone in my mind. I told myself, Return every ball, and so I did. The one match I lost, I lost because I had expected rain and had a clear vision of myself eating a bagel from Panera instead. The material world’s temptations (cinnamon crunch, strawberry cream cheese) distracted me from my true power, being a Russian-mystic-in-a-tennis-skirt.

In soccer, what I said – to myself, out loud – and what people heard, or chose not to hear . . . it didn’t seem to mean a thing.

In the early 2000s, those of us who were Baptist and Baptist-adjacent had a very labored relationship to art, literature, and pop culture. All were suspect, so we churchy girls were encouraged to get really into “clean” entertainment, meaning books that were either old and interesting, or like, hermeneutics. This is probably why Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott were linked in my mind. Unlike Harry Potter, neither would send me to hell.

As a child, I’d seen the Wishbone episode on PBS, in which Lizzy Bennet falls in love with a well-trained Jack Russell Terrier. In high school, Austen found me again, across the distance of almost 200 years. She treated my confused, contradictory feelings with dignity, humor, and affection. Superficial circumstances never stood between her and me. I carried a copy of Persuasion with me everywhere, but it didn’t fit inside my purse, so I left it unzipped. My keys and bobby pins were always falling out. A girl in my community college saw me reading in the parking lot before class; she told me that Persuasion was her favorite book, and that the older she got, the more she understood regret.

I chose Jane Austen for myself when I was on the cusp of being grown, but I had a longer history with Alcott. A girl on my Under-10 soccer team had given me a beautiful copy of Little Women for my birthday. Full color plates, gold ink on the spine. I changed teams for U-11, and from then on, I only saw my Little Women-gift giver as a competitor. When I was sixteen, I knocked her down in front of the referee. She popped up yelling WHORE! My other teammate, a tiny Jewish girl who was forever having to explain why her family didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus, came in swinging. I watched with enormous, but distant interest, as if I weren’t the one who’d started the fight to begin with.

At the end of Little Women, when untamed, big-hearted, expansive Jo meets and marries a priggish, tedious, moralizing older man, I knew, I absolutely knew, that Alcott was punishing me, her reader. Even as a ten year old, I knew this, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Now I see how it’s an ending marred by a big fat lie, one that Alcott admitted herself in a private letter:

Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her.

Where Austen believes in love, and writes stories that reach toward it, Alcott is ambivalent. Her flaw is not her hesitation, but how she fakes her certainty.

Sometimes our characters get away from us, so I can understand Alcott’s surprise that Laurie and Jo crackled on the page. Mutual understanding; mutual recognition; the author doesn’t have to like it, but it was love between the lines. Odd duck Jo had found someone who liked her exactly as she was, contradictions and all, and odd duck girls resonated with this hope that they, too, could be loved and in love.

Alcott wanted to knock her young female readers down a few pegs. We were full of yearning, and yearning made us vulnerable. Yearning also made us entitled. It gave us a yardstick to measure life by. Alcott didn’t like that, and Jo paid the price. Professor Bhaer tells her that she’s a bad writer and a bad person . . . so she marries him.

My favorite Austen was Emma. I loved that nosy, imperious, loudmouth girl. I first read it on the beach, lying on my stomach, letting the sun dry the saltwater from my hair, laughing at Mr. Woodhouse’s not unwholesome egg (boiled very soft). Emma makes every mistake under the sun, and yet! In 55 chapters, she grows up, and she finds her way to love in the end.

Even today, almost half my life later, I can find grains of white sand in that book’s pages.

Love,

Liz