Читать книгу Little Women - Louisa May Alcott - Страница 4

Readers will notice some spelling and grammatical irregularities in this edition. This is because we’ve taken our text from the original edition published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott strived to reproduce the actual speech of children, who often mispronounce words and don’t always speak in grammatical sentences. Little Amy is the worst offender, and her mistakes are usually italicized, but all the children take liberties with the language. However, when the novel was reprinted in 1880, as Elaine Showalter tells us in her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition (which likewise follows the first edition), “Alcott made a number of changes in the text, correcting grammatical errors and modifying her diction and some of her frank descriptions to suit her publisher’s expectations of polite ladylike prose.” It is this “ladylike” edition that is usually reprinted, but we believe in honoring an author’s original intentions, and prefer the unladylike daring of the first edition.