I have been reading the works of Louisa May Alcott again. It's beginning to have a bad effect on me.
Actually, I think I would be better if I kept away from Victorian novels altogether. LM Montgomery books always make me bemoan my current rut of inactivity in the writing department, and wish that I were as good/talented/etc as either Montgomery or her characters. The only thing that really helps is remembering that both Anne and Emily were older than me when they were writing. In three years I don't know what I'll think.
But Louisa May Alcott I despise in the first place. They might be all right if she stopped trying to preach every other second and had some human characters in the stories rather than distilled charicatures- Jo is the most normal one of any of her stories and that's only because it's really Alcott. But they have a bad effect on me because they set me cleaning. And planning to clean.
Since we're beginning the very beginnings of moving, I've been throwing out and sorting and at the moment the living room looks better than it has since before the wedding. Just this morning I caught myself scheduling tasks for myself after we move. Run the dishwasher every three days, laundry on Monday, grocery on Sunday, I've scheduled vaccumming! I've got them on the Outlook calendar and keep making vows to keep it up for at least the first month and see whether it works.
I've often thought that I might have lived quite comfortably in post Civil War America. This sounds insane, given what women's rights were like, but we have to take into consideration that women's rights were just beginning. 1875 was no stranger to the ills of corsets. Corsets were given up almost entirely at the end of WWI, but it was a process begun almost fifty years before, by people like the "sensible girls" Louisa May Alcott writes about. If they would just be sensible without having to preach and lecture about it to everyone else, it might not be so bad.