Little Women Month: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women: A Forward

Welcome to Little Women Month, and what better place to start than with the original classic?  In case you haven’t read it (and I don’t doubt that most of my readers were assigned this book in grade school), Little Women is the story of four sisters living in Civil War-era New England.  The March girls are individually quite different – the eldest, Meg, is motherly but yearns to be part of the social whirl; Jo is a tomboy with literary ambitions; frail and saintly Beth is a talented musician; and hot-tempered, vain Amy yearns to be an actress, though soon discovers artistic ambitions of her own. Collectively, they are charitable and resourceful, and strive to grow into accomplished and gentle women like their mother to make their battlefield-enmired father proud.  Complicating things is mischievous boy next door Theodore Laurence, who will become romantically involved with two of the girls and become the love object of another.

What transpires afterwards is a unique combination of melodrama, family saga, romance novel and morality play that traces the girls’ movement into the inevitable for women in the 1800s – marriage and children.  Along the way there’s a near-drowning, two near-fatal bouts with death/illness, a flight to New York, a trip to Paris, two births and a death.    Even with all of that on her plate Alcott manages to squeeze in a moral for each March sister, a fatal flaw that they must overcome to achieve peace. 

For Jo, it’s her harsh temper.  For Amy, her vanity.  For Beth, her shyness.  For Meg it’s the need to be au currant with the neighbors.   Alcott, who was a transcendentalist by way of her father, believed in morality, and morality is what readers of Little Women.

And yet it’s not a particularly preachy book.  Even as they grow older, the four sisters are human, flawed, and draw fond  feelings forth from their excited readership, even a hundred years plus later.

It’s also one of the few novels to still spark up a debate hundreds of years after the closure of its canon.  To this day shippers are angry with Louisa May Alcott for choosing to have Laurie marry Amy and Jo marry Friedrich, the professor she meets in New York.

That’s why Little Women has been produced and reproduced so many times; turned into a successful stage musical, re-imagined as a web series, turned into a film numerous times, and eventually re-imagined in novel form – as a thriller, an erotic novel, a modern re-imagining and a parallel retelling.