Second paragraph of third chapter:

The sun was shining, and Rose opened her window to let in the soft May air fresh from the sea. As she leaned over her little balcony, watching an early bird get the worm, and wondering how she should like Uncle Alec, she saw a man leap the garden wall and come whistling up the path. At first she thought it was some trespasser, but a second look showed her that it was her uncle returning from an early dip into the sea. She had hardly dared to look at him the night before, because whenever she tried to do so she always found a pair of keen blue eyes looking at her. Now she could take a good stare at him as he lingered along, looking about him as if glad to see the old place again.

This turned out to be the best known book published in 1875 among today’s readers, by a long way, with Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now some way behind in second place and then The Adolescent / Подросток by Dostoevsky (well ahead of the rest of the field).

I tried Little Women almost twenty years ago, and didn’t really get on with it; I found Eight Cousins even less to my taste. Orphaned Rose is sent to live with her great-aunts (one of whom is amusingly morbid) and her uncle near Boston; she finds herself thrown in with seven boy cousins all of roughly her age (thirteen) and below.

It’s all wholesome stuff. Rose is nice to the servant girl. When one of the cousins is seriously ill, she gets the others to be nice to him. Her uncle discourages her from ambitions of actually studying medicine at college, but gives her just enough (unspecified) information about human anatomy to be useful.

There are no doubt important things being said here about the status of girls and women in 1870s Massachusetts, and people who are more interested in that than I am will find the book more interesting than I did, and can get it here.

Louisa May Alcott probably knew my great-great-grandfather, William Charlton Hibbard, who was fifteen years older and lived in the same suburb of Boston. Both were definitely directly influenced by the radical Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, who was the pastor of Hibbard’s local church in West Roxbury from 1837 until he resigned in 1846 and set up his own congregation with the help of Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father.

This was my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, and Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese.