Louisa May Alcott’s classic tale of four sisters in a deluxe hardcover edition, with beautiful cover illustrations by Anna Bond, the artist behind world-renowned stationery brand Rifle Paper Co.
Grown-up Meg, tomboyish Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. The four March sisters couldn’t be more different. But with their father away at war, and their mother working to support the family, they have to rely on one another. Whether they’re putting on a play, forming a secret society, or celebrating Christmas, there’s one thing they can’t help wondering: Will Father return home safely?
원서번역서 내용 엿보기
성격도 생김새도 완전히 다른 네 자매, 메그, 조, 베스, 에이미. 소설 역사상 가장 사랑받은 자매들의 이야기를 968쪽의 디럭스 양장본으로 만난다. 긴 스토리지만 한번 읽기 시작하면 손에서 놓을 수 없는 매력 만점 작품이다.
온화하지만 허영심이 강한 메그, 천사 같은 심성을 지닌 이타주의자 베스, 투덜대면서도 자신이 나아갈 길을 아는 막내 에이미, 그리고 엉뚱한 사고뭉치지만 책을 좋아하는 작가 지망생 조. 가난하고 초라한 환경이지만 고비마다 서로에게 위로자가 되어주며 인생의 참의미를 찾아가는 네 자매는 1868년 첫 발표 이래 약 150여 년간 전 세계 50여 개국 독자들에게 꾸준히 사랑받고 있다. 독자들은 누구나 네 자매 중 한 명을 자신과 동일시하며 마치 집안의 자매들에게 빠져들었고, <타임>이 최고의 100대 소설로 선정한 것도 바로 이런 공감의 힘에서 나왔다.
작가의 의도대로 1부와 2부를 합쳐 한 권의 책으로 묶었고 완역본이다. 젊은 여성 번역가가 가급적 현대적 언어로 번역하여 가독성을 높였으며 세계적 디자인 브랜드 Rifle Paper Co.의 애나 본드가 커버를 디자인하여 소장욕구를 자극한다. 엠마 왓슨, 시얼샤 로넌, 티모시 샬라메가 출연하는 동명의 영화가 개봉되어 색다른 감동을 선사할 예정이다.
조앤 K. 롤링, 시몬 드 보부아르, 줌파 라히리가 평생 사랑한 책, <작은 아씨들>과 만나라. 물질보다 영혼의 부유함을 찾은 그들이 내면의 아름다움을 갖춘 강인한 어른이 되는 법을 기꺼이 나눠줄 것이다.
이 책의 원서번역서
작은 아씨들: 영화 원작 소설
저자 소개
저자 : Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through her writing that she finally brought them financial independence. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,” she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”
An enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals since age ten, she wrote her first melodrama at age fifteen and began publishing poems and sketches at twenty-one. Her brief service as a Civil War nurse resulted in Hospital Sketches (1863), but she earned more from the lurid thrillers she began writing in 1861 under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. These tales, with titles like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” featured strong-willed and flamboyant heroines but were not identified as Alcott’ s work until the 1940s.
Fame and success came unexpectedly in 1868. When a publisher suggested she write a “girl’s book,” she drew on her memories of her childhood and wrote Little Women, depicting herself as Jo March, while her sisters Anna, Abby May, and Elizabeth became Meg, Amy, and Beth. She re-created the high spirits of the Alcott girls and took many incidents from life but made the March family financially comfortable as the Alcotts never had been. Little Women, to its author’s surprise, struck a cord an America’s largely female reading public and became a huge success. Louisa was prevailed upon to continue the story, which she did in Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886.) In 1873 she published Work: A Story of Experience, an autobiography in fictional disguise with an all too appropriate title.
Now a famous writer, she continued to turn out novels and stories and to work for the women’s suffrage and temperance movements, as her father had worked for the abolitionists. Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott both died in Boston in the same month, March of 1888.
