Love is a great beautifier.

The line comes at the opening of the second part of Little Women, in the chapter called “Gossip”, three years after the first part ended. John Brooke has served in the war for a year, been wounded and sent home, and has taken a modest clerk’s post rather than risk borrowed money, “earning a home for Meg”. Meg, meanwhile, has spent the time “working as well as waiting”, growing wise in housekeeping “and prettier than ever”; the line explains why. She is not without regrets: her friend Sallie Gardiner has just married into a fine house and carriage, and Meg secretly wishes she could have the same.

Alcott published the first part of Little Women in 1868 and, pressed by readers who wanted to know whom the girls would marry, the second part in 1869. It is this second part, published in Britain as Good Wives, that contains the line.

The five words have become a proverb about the glow of people in love, quoted well beyond Meg’s little wedding.

Little Women, Part Two, chapter 24 (“Gossip”), 1869

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work