March | Style

March Style

Literary Reinvention

Brooks wrote March after imagining what happened to the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women during his experiences as a chaplain among the Union forces during the Civil War. She borrowed plot details and scenes from the first novel as she created a story for Mr. March, who does not have a voice in Alcott’s novel. Brooks’s novel is darker in tone and presents a more complex study of its main character.

Both novels begin with a letter from Mr. March to his family. In Alcott’s novel, the March daughters are gathered around Marmee as she reads the letter, and in Brooks’s, March is writing it from a remote military camp. Part One of Alcott’s novel ends with March’s return home after a serious illness, focusing on his appreciation of his daughters’ development into womanhood. The rest of the novel continues the story of that...
(read more)