March
Geraldine Brooks
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2005
Copyright © Geraldine Brooks 2005
PS Section copyright © Louise Tucker 2006, except ‘Little Facts’ by Geraldine Brooks © Geraldine Brooks 2006
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Geraldine Brooks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007165872
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 9780007369225 Version: 2017-11-01
For Darleen and Cassie—by no means little women.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE Virginia Is a Hard Road
CHAPTER SEVEN Bread and Shelter
CHAPTER EIGHT Learning’s Altar
CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Good Kind Man
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Blank Hospital
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Reconstruction
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN State of Grace
Jo said sadly,
“We haven’t got father, and shall not have him for a long time.” She didn’t say “perhaps never,” but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.
—Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
CHAPTER ONE Virginia Is a Hard Road
October