Little Women
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- Coming-of-age story
- Realism
What It’s About
The Trials and Triumphs of Coming-of-Age
Little Women is many things: a coming-of-age story; a collection of anecdotes illustrating life in Civil War-era America; a pastiche of domestic and didactic fictions; a reflection on living morally and a proto-feminist critique of 19th-century “separate spheres” ideology. Louisa May Alcott’s best-known, beloved novel draws readers into the world of the four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – and their mother, Marmee, and follows the girls as they grow from impulsive teens into mature young women. Alcott’s episodic narrative showcases the girls’ individuality and ambitions, their triumphs and trials, their shortcomings and evolving characters, and their relationships with one another, with their mother and with society at large. Its voice is in a manner that is, alternatingly, humorous, uplifting and, sometimes, heartbreaking. Alcott’s novel doesn’t resist sentimentality, but it balances, and, ultimately, transcends it with realistic depictions of the challenges inherent in the pursuit of true vocation and true love, the burden of domestic labor, and the effects of social pressures and life’s challenges – including illness – on female ambition.
Take-Aways
About the Author
Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The second daughter of transcendentalist philosopher, Amos Bronson Alcott, and civil rights and women’s suffrage activist, Abigail May, Louisa and her sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May experienced an unusual childhood, shaped by their parents’ beliefs and causes. Louisa, an independent, tomboyish child, received a formal education from her father, augmented by informal teachings from family friends Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller. Her father’s pursuit of his ideals often left his family suffering extreme poverty. Alcott herself began working to earn money as soon as she was able. She started writing for magazines in 1851 – producing whatever paid – under various pen names. She wrote juveniles, poems and stories as Flora Fairfield. She also wrote a number of sensationalist works – including melodramas that were staged in Boston – under the pen name A. M. Barnard. Her Hospital Sketches (1863), inspired by the letters she wrote to her family during a short period working as a Civil War nurse in Washington, DC, marked a turning point in her career, bringing Alcott the recognition and accolades she’d long desired. She used her own name for stories in various magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and The Ladies’ Companion, and edited a girl’s magazine, Merry’s Museum. In 1868 Alcott reluctantly acceded to her publisher’s request to write a book for girls. Drawing on her girlhood memories, she dashed off the first volume of Little Women. Its instant popularity finally gave her full financial independence and paved the way for her other young adult writings, including Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Her novels for adults, including Work (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), never sold as well as her young adult sagas. Alcott never married – having seen “so much of ‘the tragedy of modern married life’” – but after her sister May’s death, she cared for May’s daughter Lulu until her own passing. Alcott began suffering chronic ill health after succumbing to typhoid fever during her time as a nurse. Some authorities believe she suffered mercury poisoning from her typhoid treatments, and that she may also have developed an autoimmune disease. Alcott died of a stroke on March 6, 1888 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.
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