Melody Schwarting's Reviews > From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood

As children, Nancy McCabe and I had very similar taste in books. We loved all the books by women writers about girls who wanted to be writers. As adults, we also love visiting the homes of our favorite writers. I enjoyed sharing those memories with McCabe.

However, as a book in its own right, From Little Houses to Little Women had major structural flaws. Competing genres (memoir? bibliomemoir? travelogue? literary criticism?) fractured the chapters, and I found it hard to follow. The final two chapters and the epilogue (on Anne of Green Gables and Prince Edward Island; Little Women and Concord, Massachusetts; Emily Dickinson and Amherst, Massachusetts) were the strongest, probably because they each focused on one author and her home/the local area. Traveling the path of Laura Ingalls Wilder would have made a great book in its own right (I think there's one or two out there), but memoir/criticism chapters punctured it, and inserted another author/location (Maud Hart Lovelace of Betsy-Tacy fame) into the story. Lovelace is a dear and I want to go to her home now.

Overall, I liked each part individually. I appreciated McCabe's engagement with her literary past and present. Her take on Wilder is meaningful in light of criticism (she mentions Louise Erdrich's Birchbark House series as historically accurate alternatives). And, as an enthusiast of female authors and their homes, I enjoyed her takes on the sites, figures, and books. However, Little Houses didn't come together as a whole. Some restructuring would help. It's planted in me the idea of a travelogue/bibliomemoir that marries books and places in a coherent manner, since the one thing better than escaping to another world in a book is being in that world while reading it.

As an English major who's now a historian, I found McCabe's take on literary criticism and the endless diagnosing of historical figures with medical and psychological disorders refreshing. Part of her cynicism is certainly the distance she draws between her "fundamentalist" Christian childhood (she never defines exactly what kind of fundamentalism she experienced) and the general Christianity expressed in most of the authors she explores in detail. I always find a thoughtful take on books interesting.

Yet, I found her take on Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Anne books to be deeply disappointing. She treats them less charitably than books by Lovelace. The Montgomery chapter also didn't have as much critical/biographical engagement, and the latter Anne books are dismissed because poor Anne has given up her dream of writing to have seven children. Sorry, Anne, fulfilling the dreams of your orphanhood by having a large family isn't good enough for Nancy McCabe--you were supposed to be a writer, don't you know. Most of McCabe's complaints about Anne Shirley Blythe wouldn't apply to the Emily books, but there's nary a mention of Montgomery's most autobiographical heroine, or frankly anything else Montgomery wrote. Montgomery's mental and health struggles would have fit with the rest of McCabe's book, but they're not present in the chapter.

Honestly, this just makes me want to check off the rest of the female author's homes on my list and write my own bibliomemoir/travelogue about books, growing up, and how literature taught me the art of womanhood.