Book Review: Little Women On Their Own by Jane Nardin: Exploration of Inner Strength of Woman

Little Women On Their Own by Jane Nardin is the sequence of Little Women In India and is as interesting as the earlier part. The story is about four sisters and their life journey.  The title caption of this book says “Books are made out of other books” and I agree to it. In my opinion, each individual is no less than a compilation of many books. Jane Nardin has an excellent style of writing a story. The way she keeps continuity and crispness of the story intact, shows an in-depth analysis and ground work done before publishing her book. It also reflects the deep study of culture and geographies of the place she has taken into account in her book. The characterization and story flow also shows author’s closeness in studying life and its instances.

The hooking story keeps you engaged throughout. Catherine, one of the four sisters in the story of Little Women On Their Own by Jane Nardin, is a writer who observes life and the people around her quite closely. Lizzie or Elizabeth is passionate painter and likes to explore newer things in her journey as a painter. Jane, the third sister, is marrying James who is a professor of Languages in Maryland College, Oxford.  The four girls of May family have close-knitted family values. Catherine decides to join as a governess in a remote place of East India’s Guwahati to take care of a child of the family having tea plantations and a large volume of workers. One of the worker gets beaten up to death by the owner of tea plantation and Catherine takes it as her personal challenge to get justice for the widower of that worker.

Jane and Elizabeth, who decided to travel to England, decide to reverse the general mindset there that a married woman has least rights and maximum responsibilities to the extent of a servant in the family. The man of family, might or might not love his wife, but has all rights to make her pregnant even without her will of with no love between the two. Overall, all the four sisters, raise their voice against the shortfalls being carried out in the society thereby creating an imbalance between the poor and rich, powerful and weak, big and small and so on. Little Women On Their Own by Jane Nardin is an excellent read. It talks about the inner strength of a woman.