I wasn't too bothered about Beth; she was just another casualty of that hidden killer of the 18th & 19th C: soppiness! Here's a few examples of the top of my head:snugglepot wrote:I remember reading Little Women when I was about eleven. My mother had bought me a whole series of so called classics to get me to read something other than Enid Blyton.
I remember really enjoying it and begging for the sequel so she bought me Good Wives.
SPOILERS.....
I started reading it hoping that Jo and Laurie would get together and when she turned down his proposal I cried in frustration. But remembering Anne and Gilbert from the Green Gables series (Mum had bought me some of those, too) I kept reading.
Beth's death devastated me! Why couldn't it have been Amy? I loathed and detested Amy's character from the moment she had burnt Jo's papers and wished she had drowned when she fell in that hole in the ice.
When I came to the page where it was revealed that Amy had married Laurie I, literally, threw the book across the room! After that I refused to finish it and was devastated.
It wasn't until the 1940s version came on TV about a year later and I sat down to watch it, not knowing it included Good Wives as well, that I was able to see how the book ended.
I actually enjoyed the character of the Professor and his relationship with Jo, and Elizabeth Taylor made it hard to hate Amy as much as the book had.
After that I went back and finished Good Wives. I didn't enjoy it as much as Little Women but it was bearable. I even bought Little Men and Jo's Boys. I loved the former and detested the latter. I found the repetition of the Jo/Laurie situation with two of the next generation characters very frustrating.
- Little Nell (Old Curiosity Shop)
- Arthur (Tom Brown's Schooldays)
- Clarissa Harlowe (by Samuel Richardson)
- 2 of Frances Burney's eponymous heroines; the other just went mad for a bit
- the boy in Our Mutual Friend who was to be adopted (John?)
All died of being too soppy. Amelia Osborne in Vanity Fair was a near miss; she pulled through.
The bit I didn't like as a kid was Jo marrying Professor Bauer; wholly inappropriate and not what the readers wanted at all.