I sat on the second stair in our house in a Montreal suburb. The dog passed me from time to time and stopped to sniff, but no one else did, neither stopping nor sniffing. I don't know why I chose that place, I never had before, and I never did afterwards. Whatever the reason, on that step I read Little Women, the first 'grown-up' book that ever came my way: a book with no pictures. And for the time it took, I was in turn Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy. I didn't understand their father's absence in the Civil War - I don't think I even understood it was a war. I certainly didn't understand the references to Pilgrim's Progress. But what I did understand was that this was a new place, one where I fitted in.
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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2001-2004, edited by Lawrence Goldman
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