Age Gap Marriages In Little Women (Historical Origins) Part 6
Here is some interesting trivia. Louise’s sister Anna, she married Mr. John Pratt. Anna was 33 years old and John was 31.
In the 19th century most women married when they were very young, and a lot of people married for money. It was encouraged, not looked down upon. Anna clearly took her time to find a suitable person for herself and married for love and she was a couple years older than her husband, but that is a very small age difference.
In Little Women, Meg March, who is based on Anna Alcott, meets John Brooke when she is 17. They fall in love and the book is quite vague about John’s age, but he is written to be quite a bit older. I always thought he was maybe 8–9 years older than she so, when they marry, Meg is 21 and John is 29.
You bet your life there are people who say that he was grooming her. Little Women was not written by a man, but a woman. A woman who had a serious thing for age gaps.
Amy and Laurie also have an age gap. In the novel, Laurie is 4 years older than Amy.
That is not a huge age difference. Especially the moment when Amy lectures Laurie, she is emotionally a lot more mature than he is. Story-wise, I think they help each other to grow, and that’s beautiful.
I am still waiting an adaptation which shows that. When living in Europe studying art, Louisa’s little sister May fell in love to a young man called Ernest Nieriker. When they married, May was 38 and he was 22. She was 16 years older than Ernest.
Both LouisA’s sisters married men who were younger than them. But in Little Women, Jo and her sisters marry men who are older. Let’s go back for a moment to Louisa’s fascination with Bettina Von Arnim.
I would actually highly recommend everyone to read that book. It’s in the public domain. When Bettina wrote it, she wasn’t a child.
She was in her 30s when she wrote it. It’s based on these letters that she wrote when she was in her 20s, but she kind of makes herself more immature and more childish in the letters than she was in reality.
Then there was the ambivalent relationship with Ladislas who was 11 years younger. You know what’s coming. Henry David Thoreau was 16 years older than Louisa.
Little Women, Jo’s and Friedrich’s age difference is 16 years.
In the 19th century, the age gap marriages were very common because young women were expected to marry older men because that way their future was financially secured. I don’t know how it was in America, but for example in England, women would only inherit a small sum of their father’s money and the rest would go to their closest male relative. Jane Austen is another writer who has a great deal of age gap relationships in her novels. Mr. Darcy is 8 years older than Elizabeth Bennet.
My personal favorite, Mr. Knightley is 15 years older than Emma. Then there is the 19-year age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. Another example of age gaps in the 19th century literature is Jane Eyre, who in the book is 18 years younger than Rochester.
