Hey, it sucks to be a teenage girl no matter what time period it is.

Especially if you're dying of consumption.

Little Women is relatively light on the sanctimony and self-righteousness when compared to some of her other screeds/novels. Jack and Jill is a tract on alternative home education that reeks sanctimony. Eight Cousins is only saved by those male cousins and their entertaining ways, as well as Rose's little feminine vanities that make her human (I love the scene where she gets tempted into having her ears pierced and she tries to hide it for fear of being teased over her girly ways).

Especially if you're dying of consumption.

God, consumpation confused me back in the day. I couldn't figure it out, and the name was SO not helpful. But in almost every novel I read in a certain period of my teenage years, someone was dying poetically and wanly of consumption.

"La grippe" also confused me for a while. I think I was thirty before I figured out it was a fancy, stuck-up way of saying "cold or flu, I dunno, I'm Victorian."

There are a couple of scenes where Beth? Amy? is reforming Laurie that made me rethink my idea that the unabridged version is always better than the abridged (see my adored Count of Monte Cristo). But the abridged LW always chokes me up when Amy? Beth? gets sick.

I could barely read Jack and Jill once, but I actually like Eight Cousins/Rose in Bloom better than Little Women and its sequels. However, I'm apparently weird in that I'm actually glad Rose ended up with Mac instead of Charlie, because I totally would've picked Mac myself. However, I wouldn't necessarily have gone to the extreme of sanctimoniously killing Charlie to get him out of the way if it'd been my book.

FWIW, I also like An Old-Fashioned Girl better than Little Women despite its high sanctimony. I think i just like Rose and Polly better than the March girls, so it follows that I like their books better.

One of the more amusing moviegoing experiences I have had was the elderly couple behind me at Moulin Rouge heatedly arguing over whether Nicole Kidman was dying of consumption or tuberculosis.

Beth's the one who gets sick and dies.

Amy lives, marries Laurie, and lives happily - and richly - ever after. (Their daughter is in Jo's Boys.)

I think my favorite Friends episode ever is the one where Joey and Rachel trade favorite books, and my favorite moments are around Rachel spoiling him for Beth's death and the bit at the end where he puts the book in the freezer because Beth is sick...

The Old Fashioned Girl is one of my favorite books of all time, even if it is sanctimonious. I love Polly, and Tom, and Fanny, and young Maud! I just want to live in Polly's little apartment with her cat and her coal fire and the young female artists downstairs!

Huh. I don't think I KNEW there was an unabridged version of LW. Which makes me want to immediately run out and read it.

The unabriged version, held up next to the abriged version (metaphorically held up, though if you want to actually hold them up, go ahead) is a perfect example of Why Editing Is Good.

I loved the episode of Friends where Rachel gets Joey to read Little Women, and he gets all teary over Beth: "If I keep reading is Beth gonna die?"