Little Women, the gray dawn of Christmas
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ProseEmma, the view from Donwell AbbeyJane Austen, published 1815A summer view of English fields and gardens from the grounds of Donwell Abbey.hard340 characters
ProseEmma, the village of HighburyJane Austen, published 1815A short portrait of Highbury and of the place the Woodhouse family holds in it.medium428 characters
ProsePersuasion, the walk down to the sea at LymeJane Austen, published 1818The party from Uppercross settles at an inn in Lyme and goes straight down to the shore.easy260 characters
Louisa May Alcott wrote the first part of Little Women in a few weeks in 1868, at the suggestion of her publisher Thomas Niles. Alcott based the four sisters on herself and her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. A second part followed in 1869 and the two later appeared as one book. The full text is on Project Gutenberg.
Where this text comes fromThe scene turns on an absence. Jo wakes and the stockings are not there, and everything that follows in the chapter comes from that small disappointment being met rather than fixed. Alcott is doing something deliberate: the book opens with the sisters complaining about being poor at Christmas, and this is the morning that answers them. The Gutenberg edition linked below carries both parts of the novel as one continuous text, which is how the book has been read since the 1880s and not how it was first sold.
What you might not noticeThe dawn is gray here, spelled the American way, and Christmas takes a capital in the same line. Jo is the only person named in the fragment: the mother appears only by her relation, and the book she has left is never titled. Source
What it trainsThree sentences averaging twenty-two words, four commas, and almost no capital letters: four in the whole passage and only one of them inside a sentence. After the verse and the founding documents on this shelf, that is a very light load on the left hand, and the difficulty moves entirely into sustained accuracy. The one awkward run is crimson-covered, fifteen characters joined by a hyphen with no space, arriving at the end of a clause. The one apostrophe is typed with the quote key in your home row and stands on screen exactly as you press it.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1868, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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