March by Geraldine Brooks

This is the story of Mr. March the shadowy father figure in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”. We first encounter March working as a Union Chaplain during the Civil War trying to find ways of writing cheerful letters home while surrounded by the wanton cruelty, racism and ignorance of the war which he is helpless to prevent. Throughout this story weaves his early history as a peddler traveling across the South to make his fortune, his encounter with the Clements and their educated slave girl Grace, whom he meets again as the war takes him across the same path. His courtship and early married life with Marmee, a girl with a temper and frustrated by the role of women. His friendships with Emerson and Thoreau and the loss of his fortune. March becomes a school teacher for the black “contraband” on a plantation, but when the Confederates attack, the story is taken up by his wife, Marmee, who comes to find him in a Washington hospital. She gives us different eyes to view the past years as she uncovers the parts of her husband’s life of which he has never spoken.