An Old-Fashioned Girl is a children's novel by Louisa May Alcott about Polly Milton, a country girl who visits her wealthy cousins in the city. Through her simple, warm ways, the story explores home, friendship and growing up amid changing fashions. It offers a gentle, engaging portrait of character and family life.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
AN OLD-FASHIONED GIRL
By Louisa M. Alcott
Preface
AS a preface is the only place where an author can with propriety explain a purpose or apologize for shortcomings,
I venture to avail myself of the privilege to make a statement for the benefit of my readers.
As the first part of “An Old-Fashioned Girl” was written in 1869, the demand for a sequel, in beseeching little letters that made refusal impossible, rendered it necessary to carry my heroine boldly forward some six or seven years into the future. The domestic nature of the story makes this audacious proceeding possible; while the lively fancies of my young readers will supply all deficiencies, and overlook all discrepancies.
This explanation will, I trust, relieve those wellregulated minds, who cannot conceive of such literary lawlessness, from the bewilderment which they suffered when the same experiment was tried in a former book.
The “Old-Fashioned Girl” is not intended as a perfect model, but as a possible improvement upon [Page] the Girl of the Period, who seems sorrowfully ignorant or ashamed of the good old fashions which make woman truly beautiful and honored, and, through her, render home what it should be,-a happy place, where parents and children, brothers
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