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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the moral center of the chapter and the pivot on which its whole argument turns. Mr. March's letter arrives after the girls have spent the evening complaining about poverty, work, and disappointment. Rather than addressing those complaints, the letter reframes the challenge entirely: hard days are not obstacles to endure but opportunities that 'need not be wasted.' The phrase 'bosom enemies' quietly names the chapter's hidden subject — not poverty or war, but the inner faults each girl will name moments later. The parallel tripling — 'faithfully... bravely... beautifully' — carries the rhetorical weight of a charge, and 'conquer themselves so beautifully' is the phrase that moves Amy to self-accusation. Copying this passage by hand gives students a chance to feel how the letter's syntax performs its meaning.
A year seems very long to wait before I see them, but remind them that while we wait we may all work, so that these hard days need not be wasted. I know they will remember all I said to them, that the...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell the events of Chapter 1 in order: what the sisters are doing when we first meet them, what happens when Marmee arrives, and how the evening ends. Include what each sister says she wants at the beginning and what she resolves to work on by the close.
Discussion Questions
- Jo insists she 'can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy' and pulls off her net in protest when Meg tells her to 'behave better, Josephine.' Yet minutes later she announces, 'I'm the man of the family now papa is away, and I shall provide the slippers.' Why does Jo resist the role Meg describes but fight her sisters for this one — and what do her specific words about the slippers, and the way she competes for the right to provide them, show us about how Jo understands her own relationship to duty and family?
- While her sisters are each planning to spend their dollar on themselves, Beth is the one who quietly suggests, 'Let's each get her something for Christmas, and not get anything for ourselves.' The others agree at once — but none of them thought of it first. Why does the idea come from Beth, and what do at least two other moments in the chapter — in what she notices, what she says, or how she is described — show us about the kind of attention she brings that her sisters do not?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
feeling at peace and satisfied with one's situation, without wishing for more than one has
Item 2
giving up something you value — time, comfort, money, or a wish — for the benefit of someone else or a larger purpose
Item 3
rudely bold or disrespectful in a way that crosses proper social boundaries; not showing appropriate respect
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Critical Thinking
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