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J U N E 1 8 7 0
An Old-fashioned Girl, by Louisa May Alcott
If we said that Miss Alcott, as a writer for young people just getting to be
young ladies and gentlemen, deserved the great good luck that has attended her
books, we should be using an unprofessional frankness and putting in print
something we might be sorry for after the story of the Old-fashioned
Girl had grown colder in our minds. And yet it is a pretty story, a very
pretty story; and almost inexplicably pleasing, since it is made up of such
plain material, and helped off with no sort of adventure or sensation. It is
nothing, in fact, but the story of a little girl from the country, who comes to
visit a gay city family, where there is a fashionable little lady of her own
age, with a snubbed younger sister, a gruff, good-hearted, mischievous brother,
-- as well as a staid, sensible papa, a silly, sickly mamma, and an old-time
grandmother. In this family Polly makes herself ever so lovely and useful, so
that all adore her, though her clothes are not of the latest fashion, nor her
ideas, nor her principles; and by and by, after six years, when she returns
again to the city to give music-lessons and send her brother to college, Mr.
Shaw fails, and the heartlessness of fashionable life, which his children had
begun to suspect, is plain to them, and Tom's modish fiancee jilts him, and
Polly marries him, and Fanny Shaw gets the good and rich and elegant Sydney,
who never cared for her money, and did not make love to her till she was poor.
That is about all; and as none of these people or their doings are strange or
remarkable, we rather wonder where the power of the story lies. There's some
humor in it, and as little pathos as possible, and a great deal of good sense,
but also some poor writing, and some bad grammar. One enjoys the simple tone,
the unsentimentalized facts of common experience, and the truthfulness of many
of the pictures of manners and persons. Besides, people always like to read of
kindly self-sacrifice, and sweetness, and purity, and naturalness; and this is
what Polly is, and what her character teaches in a friendly and unobtrusive way
to everybody about her. The story thus mirrors the reader's good-will in her
well-doing, and that is perhaps what, more than any other thing, makes it so
charming and comfortable; but if it is not, pleasing the little book remains
nevertheless; and nobody can be the worse for it. Perhaps it is late to observe
that the scene of the story is in Boston; at least, the locality is
euphuistically described as "the most conceited city in New England"; and we
suppose Springfield will not dispute the distinction with us.
The Atlantic Monthly, June 1870.
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