“You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.”
How many mothers today give such wise and well-worded advice to their daughters? That’s Mrs. March, or Marmee to her four girls, talking to her youngest in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Re-reading this classic is the perfect bedtime story – tales of the girls’ adventures told in charming sentences such as these. Alcott’s Little Women was an instant popular and critical success; it originally came out as two novels published in 1868 and 1869.