An Old-Fashioned Girl

Polly Milton is fourteen, from the country, and her clothes are wrong. Her visit to the Shaws in Boston starts badly. Fanny's friends have no use for her and the house runs on money and fashion she does not have, so she works her way into the family one person at a time, beginning with the grandmother upstairs whom nobody else has time for.

The book breaks in half, visibly. Alcott ran six chapters in Merry's Museum in 1869 and then wrote thirteen more, and part two jumps six years. The grandmother is dead, Polly is back in the city as a music teacher renting a room from an old landlady, counting lesson money, and sitting with a girl named Jane whom that landlady takes in after a suicide attempt. Then Tom's debts come out and the Shaw money is gone. What the second half is really about is women earning: the lessons, the studios, the self-supporting women Polly introduces Fanny to, and the flat proposition that this beats being kept.

The moralizing is direct and never lets up, and Polly is right in every scene, which flattens her. The romance is engineered too. She renounces Mr. Sydney to protect Fanny, and Tom goes out West with her brother Ned and comes back to propose. It lands for readers who liked the household economics of Little Women and want the version where a girl's independence is the plot rather than a phase.