Little Women

About this book

Little Women is a novel by Louisa May Alcott about four sisters growing up in a New England household during and after the American Civil War. The first volume was published in 1868 and the second in 1869, and the two have been printed together ever since. Alcott wrote it at a publisher’s request for a “girls’ book” and drew heavily on her own family: the four March sisters correspond closely to Alcott and her three sisters, and Jo March is a version of the author.

The book was a commercial success at once and has never gone out of print. It has been filmed many times and translated into dozens of languages. Its lasting appeal is usually put down to the sisters themselves, who are drawn with enough sharpness that readers argue about them, and to Jo in particular, whose refusal to fit the expected shape of a heroine made her a model for generations of readers who wanted to write.

The story

The novel opens at Christmas. Mr. March is away serving as a chaplain in the Union army, and his wife and daughters are managing on little money. Meg, the eldest, works as a governess; Jo, who wants to be a writer, is a companion to a wealthy aunt; Beth is shy and musical; Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain. Next door lives a lonely boy, Laurie, with his grandfather, and he is soon absorbed into the family.

The first volume follows a year of small events: parties, quarrels, a play staged in the attic, an illness, a telegram from Washington. The second, which Alcott’s publisher originally issued as Good Wives, picks the sisters up three years later as they begin to leave home, marry, travel and work. The question hanging over it, and one Alcott’s readers wrote to her about in large numbers, is whom Jo will or will not marry.

Themes and historical context

Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, was a Transcendentalist philosopher and a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and the family was often poor. Louisa supported them with her writing, including sensational stories published under a pseudonym, and she wrote Little Women quickly and without much enthusiasm for the assignment. The novel’s interest in work, money and a woman’s right to earn a living comes directly from that experience.

The book sits between two traditions. It is a domestic novel in the line of Charlotte Yonge and the moral tales children were given at the time, and it borrows its structure from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which the sisters play at in the first chapter. It is also a book about independence, and its tension between those two things is why critics continue to find it worth arguing over.

The Civil War is present mostly as absence: the father’s letters, the shortages, the telegram. Alcott had served as a nurse in a Union hospital in Washington in 1862 and 1863, until typhoid sent her home, and her matter-of-fact handling of illness in the novel reflects that.

Who should read it

Little Women is a long book but an easy one. The chapters are mostly self-contained episodes, the language is plain, and the moralizing, which is real, is lighter than in most children’s fiction of the period. Adult readers tend to notice how much of the book is about money and how unsentimental Alcott is about it. The second volume is more adult in subject than the first and some young readers stop at the halfway point, which is where the original first volume ended.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg text contains both volumes under the single title. No transcriber credits are recorded in the catalog entry.