Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888).
Originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, Alcott wrote the book over several months at the request of her publisher.[1][2] The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters,[3][4]: 202 it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.[5][6]: 12
Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, with readers eager for more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume (titled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, though the name originated with the publisher and not Alcott). It was also met with success. The two volumes were issued in 1880 as a single novel titled Little Women. Alcott subsequently wrote two sequels to her popular work, both also featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).
The novel has been said to address three major themes: "domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity."[7]: 200 According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new genre. Elbert argues that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her various aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.[7]: 199
The book has been translated into numerous languages, and frequently adapted for stage and screen.
Louisa May Alcott (/ˈɔːlkət, -kɒt/; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).[1] Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.[2]
Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, Alcott sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults that focused on passion and revenge.[3]
Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Alcott Pratt. The novel was well received at the time and is still popular today among both children and adults. It has been adapted many times to stage, film, and television.
An abolitionist and a feminist, Alcott was active in reform movements such as temperance and women's suffrage throughout her life.[4] Alcott never married. She died from a stroke, two days after her father, in Boston on March 6, 1888.