Bookshelf · Classic LitPreview

Jo March.

Little Women · 1868 / 2019

The original writer-girl. Jo’s attic library: Pilgrim’s Progress, Dickens, Goethe — and the manuscripts she hides under the floorboards.

"I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe."

3 booksCurated · cited · cross-referenced

The shelf, decoded

Why this list.

Jo March reads everything Marmee approves of, plus a stack of penny dreadfuls Marmee does not. The list below is the actual Alcott-cited canon of the March attic.

The reading list

3 books for Jo.

No. 01On screen
The Pilgrim’s Progress
John Bunyan
The structural backbone of Little Women. Jo names it in chapter one.
CitationNovel, Chapter 1
No. 02Character fit
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
The novel Jo wishes she had written.
CitationCharacter-fit
No. 03Character fit
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read by Jo after she rejects Laurie. The book is, briefly, all the consolation she has.
CitationCharacter-fit

Closing note

Take garrets, take pens.

Jay Gatsby

Cover of Stoddard’s Lectures by John L. Stoddard

Cover of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Cover of This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A library full of uncut pages. Gatsby owns the books he was never given the time — or class — to read. The list is a story of longing.

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The Catcher in the RyeSoon

Holden Caulfield

Cover of Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Cover of The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Phonies on every shelf, but a few authors get a pass. Holden actually reads — Fitzgerald, Hardy, Isak Dinesen — between the cigarettes and the contempt.

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Pride and PrejudiceSoon

Elizabeth Bennet

Cover of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Cover of Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women by James Fordyce

The original quick-witted reader. Lizzie’s library: novels her mother disapproves of, conduct manuals she ignores, and the letters that change everything.

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Browse all 25 character lists