Jo's Boys (Annotated)

This Braga Books Enhanced Edition has been annotated with the following:Historical PrefaceForewordIntroductionAuthor Detailed Biography6 Period RecipesExplanation of Historical ContextWhat becomes of idealism when it meets the world? That is the governing question of Jo's Boys, Louisa May Alcott's final novel in the March sequence and her most philosophically searching work. The boys of Plumfield have grown up. They are men now, and the women who were raised alongside them have grown as well, with ambitions and convictions that the genteel fiction of the 1880s rarely permitted women to hold so plainly. Alcott follows them all into careers, marriages, and failures, tracking not the turns of plot but the moral consequences of how one chooses to live.Plumfield was built on Transcendentalist faith: the belief that education rightly conceived could produce not merely knowledgeable people but genuinely good ones. Jo's Boys submits that faith to sustained and honest testing. Nat Blake, gifted and unreliable, reveals the gap between good intentions and good action. Dan Kean, the wildest of Plumfield's original students, follows a path that no amount of principled schooling could fully redirect. Nan Harding refuses marriage to practice medicine in an era that regarded women physicians with suspicion. Each life is a case study in the distance between the values one is taught and the values one is actually able to live by.Alcott wrote this novel under conditions of considerable personal difficulty, in pain and under sustained financial pressure, and the result carries the particular authority of a writer who had earned the right to speak plainly. Jo's Boys is quieter and more honest than its predecessors, less willing to arrange experience into comfortable resolution, more attentive to the texture of moral effort as a lifelong rather than a once-accomplished condition. It is the work of someone who understood that character is not inherited but forged, and that the forging never entirely stops.For readers of classic American literature, Victorian fiction, and the literature of moral philosophy, this Braga Books edition brings the scholarly depth that Alcott's final novel has long deserved. Begin reading a masterwork of nineteenth-century American fiction by clicking ADD TO CART. Read more