ABSTRACT
Feminist reinterpretations of familiar classics like The Secret Garden and Little Women turn stories we thought were about struggles to conform to the social order into stories about women’s healing and successful communities of women (Bixler, Nelson, Auerbach). Little Women-as read by Edward Salmon (a nineteenth-century authority on children’s literature) in his 1888 obituary of Alcott in Atalanta-is a story about instructing girls to be ‘the proper guardians of their brothers’ and to be ‘all-powerful for good in their relations with men’ (449). But for Nina Auerbach, in Communities of Women (1978), it is the story of ‘the formation of a reigning feminist sisterhood whose exemplary unity will heal a fractured society’ (37). The critical rereading turns it from a story about women learning how to serve men into a story of women supporting each other.
