![]() ![]() Action and location are compellingly rendered – the heat of the South and the funk of war- and slavery-ruined bodies rises from the page. It is under her encouragement, or so he believes, that he joins the army. He meets and marries the impassioned Marmee, who drives him to become more deeply involved in the abolitionist movement. ![]() He becomes a chaplain, deciding that “the pulpit was the place from which to decry this barbarous system”. ![]() While March recounts his war time tribulations he explains how he came to be there, from his early witnessing of the slave system while a salesman in his twenties to becoming a avowed abolitionist in the radical Massachusetts enclave of Concord, alongside real figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He is writing from an island in the Potomac River, literally and figuratively on the border between the two sides. “I never promised I would write the truth,” March confesses, and indeed he leaves much out, the horrors of war and secrets from his own past. It begins with March writing a letter shortly after a disastrous Union attempt to gain some ground from the Confederates. In March, both the protagonist’s name and a suggestion of military movement, Geraldine Brooks fills in the blanks. In Little Women the girls’ father is an absence for most of the novel, off serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War. ![]()
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