title: The Quiet Little Woman: a Christmas Story
author: LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
description: Hardcover: 128 pages
  Publisher: HONOR BOOKS; Large Print edition (1999)
  Language: English
  ISBN-10: 073940640X
  ISBN-13: 978-0739406403
   Product Dimensions:  8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches 
  Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
zlib_text: 
  
  
  Afterword
  
  
  _March_ is a work of fiction that draws its inspiration from one of the great
  American families of the nineteenth century, the Alcotts of Concord,
  Massachusetts. For its scaffolding, I have borrowed from Louisa May Alcott’s
  iconic _Little Women,_ among the first novels to deal, albeit glancingly, with
  the Civil War. But it is to Alcott’s father, the transcendentalist
  philosopher, educator, and abolitionist, A. Bronson Alcott, that I am most
  indebted.
  
  
  Readers _of Little Women_ will remember that the novel opens on a rather bleak
  Christmas Eve in the home of the March family. The father of Meg, Jo, Beth,
  and Amy is absent: he has gone south to minister to Union troops. In a
  dramatic moment two-thirds of the way through the narrative, a telegram
  arrives, urgently summoning Mrs. March to Washington, where her husband lies
  gravely ill. The crisis is resolved when Mr. March appears unexpectedly on the
  following Christmas Day, so that the year, and the novel as it was origina