Her And Her ... And Her

As women are increasingly (and finally) being heard, stories of female troikas — from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” to Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” to “The First Wives Club” — have taken on unexpected resonance, speaking to both the power of the collective and to finding one’s own voice among the clamour of the crowd.

- Megan O'Grady

As a girl of 6 or 8 or 10, I spent the long Midwestern summers and longer winters reading the sort of books one typically gave to American girls in the mid-1980s, many of which featured trios of female characters: the frontier Ingalls sisters of “Little House on the Prairie” (1935); Nancy Drew and her two sidekicks; the triumvirate of friends in turn-of-the-20th-century Minnesota in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books of the 1940s and ’50s. In time, I would acquaint myself with the Civil War-era sisters growing up in genteel poverty in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868-69 “Little Women” (after Beth dies, there are three); and after that, the many geometries of women, sisters and friends, as well as meddling aunts and ineffectual mothers, in the 19th-century novels of Jane Austen. In my marked-up Keds, I’d let myself into an empty suburban house after school with my own key, settling down to a package of peanut-butter crackers and a book that seemed to offer three choices of who to be — books so immersive I forgot about watching Mary, Laura and Carrie on television reruns, or those other sisters who immediately followed on channel 13, Marcia, Jan and Cindy.