Little Women

Little Women Review

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868 at the request of her publisher, who wanted a book for girls. Alcott was not enthusiastic — she preferred sensation fiction — but what she produced became the novel she will always be known for, and one of the most beloved works in the American tradition.

The novel is semi-autobiographical: the March family is the Alcott family, and Jo is Louisa. The four sisters — responsible Meg, ambitious Jo, gentle Beth, and vain but growing Amy — come of age in Civil War-era New England while their father serves as a chaplain at the front. The novel follows them through girlhood into young womanhood, charting the choices each must make between what society expects and what they privately want.

Jo March is the reason the novel has endured. She wants to write; she is impatient with the constraints of femininity; she is direct, funny, quick-tempered, and genuinely gifted. Alcott wanted her to remain independent. Publishers and readers demanded she marry. The compromise Alcott reached remains one of the most debated romantic resolutions in American fiction — and what makes it interesting is that Jo’s dissatisfaction is legible in the text. She does not entirely want what she ends up with, and Alcott lets that show. The novel’s most radical quality is this refusal to fully resolve the tension between female aspiration and the lives actually available.

Little Women is also not a comfortable novel in the way nostalgic readings suggest. The treatment of Beth’s illness and death is unsentimental and precise — Alcott does not prettify grief. The comedy is equally genuine and specific: the amateur theatricals, the burned manuscripts, the lime pickles. Alcott’s domestic world is fully alive, and its inhabitants have never stopped feeling real.