Moods

About the book

Sylvia Yule's restless temperament and desire for a fuller life bring her into close association with Adam Warwick and Geoffrey Moor. A journey shared with companions gives emotional possibilities an intensity that ordinary domestic routines have not supplied. As admiration, friendship, gratitude, and love become entangled, Sylvia faces choices whose permanence exceeds her understanding of her own feelings. Alcott treats marriage as the beginning of further moral and emotional difficulty rather than a simple conclusion to courtship. The title points towards the changing states through which people perceive themselves and others, and towards the danger of treating a temporary certainty as complete knowledge. The novel's serious concern with responsibility and self-interpretation gives its romantic conflict a different emphasis from the domestic reassurance readers may expect from Alcott's better-known work.

• Feeling and judgment
• Marriage
• Self-knowledge

Why read it

For an Alcott novel that treats romantic choice as a difficult problem of self-knowledge with consequences beyond courtship.

Novel · English text