Daniel Shealy's annotated edition of Little Women is a must for academic collections and libraries, though it is probably not the best edition for the first-time reader. Weighing in at four pounds, four ounces, it is not a book to curl up with. The textual apparatus is straightforward. Shealy uses the first edition of 1868, with its breezy slang and realistic descriptions, as opposed to the gentrified 1880–81 edition. (Mrs. March therefore remains stout, rather than tall, and is not described as noble-looking.) Textual variants are listed at the end, and indicated in the text, inconspicuously, by superscript characters. The format of the notes, however, militates against uninterrupted reading pleasure. This is the only edition where this reviewer longed for an index to the footnotes, which are copious in the extreme, and not actually footnotes so much as sidebars. Each page is split into two columns, with the novel in black and the notes in red, and is further interrupted by a plethora of beautifully reproduced illustrations, of historic photographs, book illustrations, playbills, temperance broadsides, movie stills, May Alcott's paintings, and letters, inter alia. Annoyingly there is no list of these illustrations; if the reader wants to go back to recheck an image it is a question of flicking through the whole volume, and the same is true if one wants to recheck a topic in the notes.

Shealy's introduction is informative for both the scholar and the general reader, underlining the fact that the book was aimed at teenagers on the brink of adulthood, not children; drawing on a wealth of archival materials and the latest scholarship; and emphasizing the book's status as a runaway, international bestseller, never out of print. Alcott was so pestered by fans and autograph hunters that she wrote to the Springfield Republican in 1869 threatening to turn the garden hose on them. She appeared on postage stamps; her tomb in Concord (bearing the US flag, to mark her status as a veteran, a nurse in the Civil War) still attracts memorabilia and personal messages; and her most famous novel has appeared in keepsake and scholarly editions, television series, cartoons, films, and literary sequels (most recently Geraldine Brooks's Pulitzer Prize-winner, March, 2006.) Shealy needs therefore to appeal to a very mixed audience, and to pitch the edition at different levels. The notes cover all sorts of biographical, historical and social contextualizations (from the innermost workings of the Alcott family to what slavery was and the casualty rate in the Civil War), but many also include hefty extracts from recent scholarly essays and monographs.

Literary specialists in particular will welcome explanations of recondite allusions. Dickens and drama pervade the novel, often together. Alcott acted in adaptations of The Cricket on the Hearth and Martin Chuzzlewit; the phrase “little woman” was adopted from Bleak House. Works by Charlotte M. Yonge, Caroline Oliphant and Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard are now thoroughly forgotten, and how many of us can identify plays like The Toodles (1848), or The Busy Body (1709)? (Though the rise of vegetarianism has made the reference to John Evelyn's Acetaria: A Discourse on Sallets (1699) rather more accessible.) The account of Pilgrim's Progress, the intertextual spine of the novel, is useful to readers who can no longer identify Apollyon or Vanity Fair, or know how Faithful was tortured. While many notes divert the reader away from the text itself, others speed up the reading process by resolving difficulties, glossing slang or social practices. Shealy is particularly good on nineteenth-century games (Candor, Buzz, The Mansion of Bliss), clothing (how to turn a dress to make it new), dress materials (drab as plain-weave wool), etiquette (mourning, chaperonage) and dancing (dance cards, the redowa, the cotillion). He is also a fine critic, especially in close reading of dialogue and its social implications. Some annotations do seem redundant. Did we need a description of a dahlia, or pansies, or a sweet pea (with illustrations)? When Meg burns her jam was it relevant that blackcurrants were later banned in America, and did we need a recipe? Many readers will not require explanations of cricket, bonbons or Faber pencils, or to have “decided” translated as “determined.” But all in all Shealy has done a splendid job here. Errors? Saint Martin was the Bishop of Tours, not Tour (560).