Louisa Alcott: Little Women

(p. 365) criticizing the latest celebrity who has arrived—Ristori or Dickens, Victor Emmanuel or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands: The celebrities mentioned include Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906), a leading Italian tragic actress, and Victor Emmanuel II, king of Italy from 1861 to 1878. The queen of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands was at this time probably the beautiful, partly Caucasian Queen Emma, widow of King Kamehameha IV (1834-1863).

(p. 369) “the lovely road to Villa Franca, Schubert’s Tower, just below, and . . . that speck far out to sea which they say is Corsica?”: Ville franche is a port district on the Mediterranean east of Nice. Amy refers to “Schubert’s Tower,” but it was French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz who in 1844 stayed in an old tower in Nice. Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean, is the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte.

(p. 372) “A daughter of the gods, l Divinely tall, and most divinely fair,”; The quotation is from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “A Dream of Fair Women” (1833), referring to Iphigenia, a legendary Greek princess almost sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, so that his warships could pass to Troy; she was saved by the Greek moon goddess Artemis (whom the Romans called Diana).

(p. 415) from gloomy St. Gingolf to sunny Montreux, with the Alps of Savoy on one side, Mont St. Bernard and the Dent du Midi on the other, pretty Vevay in the valley, and Lausanne upon the hill beyond: These sites are in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, an area that was very popular in the nineteenth century because of its tourist resorts, vineyards, and alpine views. St. Gingolf is a village on the France-Switzerland border at Lake Geneva. Montreux is another tourist resort on Lake Geneva, southeast of Vevey. The Savoy Alps are a mountainous region on the France-Italy border whose highest point is Mont Blanc. Mont St. Bernard is an alpine mountain on the Switzerland-Italy border. Dent du Midi is a mountain in the Swiss Alps, south of Montreux. Lausanne is an important Swiss city on Lake Geneva famous for its Gothic cathedral.

(p. 416) They had been talking of Bonnivard, as they glided past Chillon, and of Rousseau, as they looked up at Clarens, where he wrote his Heloise: The Swiss monastic prior Francois de Bonnivard (c.1493-1570) supported a revolt against Charles III, the duke of Savoy, for which he was twice imprisoned, once at Chillon, a medieval castle fortress on Lake Geneva; his story inspired numerous works of nineteenth-century literature, most famously English Romantic poet Lord Byron’s poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” (1816). The influential Swiss philosopher and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) set his popular epistolary romance novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) in this region, in the resort village of Clarens.

(p. 468) Mr. March strolled placidly about, quoting Tusser, Cowley, and Columella: Thomas Tusser (1524-1580) was an English poet who wrote on agriculture; his verse gave rise to many proverbs. Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) was an English poet and scholar. Lucius Junius Columella was a first-century Roman writer on agriculture.