In brief
Four sisters in a New England town, with their father away at the Civil War and not much money, set out to improve their characters on the model of The Pilgrim’s Progress. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” Jo grumbles on the first page, and within a chapter they have agreed to spend their dollars on their mother, and within two to carry their Christmas breakfast to a poor family. Little happens, as novels usually count it. One girl is humiliated at school over some pickled limes, and burns her sister’s manuscript. Another sells her hair for twenty-five dollars. A third catches scarlet fever, and later dies of what it left.
It has lasted because Alcott, whatever her reputation, was not sentimental about any of this. She grew up poor in a family run on principle. The book comes in two parts, the 1868 book of childhood and the 1869 book of what became of it, and the second is the stranger and better: the home breaks up, the best-loved sister dies, the heroine turns down the rich boy next door, and it all ends in a school full of noisy boys.
The argument
The official doctrine is self-conquest. Jo has let Amy go through the ice, after Amy burned her book, and she goes to her mother in horror at her own temper. Mrs March replies with the most startling line in the novel: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it” (ch. 8). It is comfort, and it is also the news that the serene woman at the centre of this house is furious, and that the reward for good behaviour is a lifetime of holding it in.
Judith Fetterley’s essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War” (1979) argued that Jo is the book’s vital centre because she is the least a little woman, and that the novel is at war with itself over her. The first speech of real force is Jo’s “I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy” (ch. 1), and everything that follows teaches her to get over it. The sale of her hair is an act of love and the novel’s neatest image of the transaction: “Your one beauty”, the family cry (ch. 15), and it goes to pay for her father.
Then there is marriage. Mrs March tells Meg and Jo that “To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman”, and in the same speech that she would rather see them “poor men’s wives” than “queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace” (ch. 9). The first is what the century required; the second is what the novel acts on. Jo tells Laurie, “I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up for any mortal man” (ch. 35). The book ends by marrying her anyway, and it does not hide that this is a loss. “The life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely, and cold to me now,” she says at the close (ch. 47), in the voice of someone successfully taught. Many readers do not quite believe her, and the book lets them doubt.
The shape of the book
Part First (chapters 1–23) runs in episodes, in which each girl meets a trial named from Bunyan. Beth “finds the Palace Beautiful” in the Laurences’ piano (ch. 6), Amy goes through her “Valley of Humiliation” (ch. 7), Jo “meets Apollyon” in her own temper (ch. 8), Meg “goes to Vanity Fair” at the Moffats’ (ch. 9). Then the telegram about Mr March (ch. 15) and Beth’s fever (ch. 18) end the playing. The part closes with Alcott bargaining openly with her readers: “So grouped, the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama” (ch. 23).
Part Second (chapters 24–47) begins three years later, with “a little gossip about the Marches” (ch. 24), and it is built on departures. Meg marries and fails at jelly (ch. 28). Amy gets the European trip Jo wanted, because Jo said the wrong thing in front of their aunt (ch. 30). Jo goes to New York and writes trash for money (ch. 34). Laurie proposes and is refused (ch. 35). Beth dies (ch. 40). And the moral game stops working. Bunyan’s hill Difficulty comes back in ch. 42, when Jo tries to take Beth’s place at home and finds she cannot be good by wanting to. The harvest is an odd one: a school full of boys at Plumfield, a house left to Jo by the aunt who tried to reform her, and the last words go to Marmee: “I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!” (ch. 47).
The voice
What surprises an adult reader is how funny the book is. Alcott’s narrator is a brisk aunt who breaks in when she feels like it. She excuses the love scenes in Part Second by quoting Mrs March, “What can you expect when I have four gay girls in the house, and a dashing young neighbor over the way?” (ch. 24), and she interrupts Jo’s drift into spinsterhood to scold her readers: “Don’t laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragical romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns” (ch. 43).
Her restraint shows at the most dangerous moment. Beth’s death could have gone the way of Dickens’s Little Nell. Instead: “Seldom, except in books, do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or depart with beatified countenances; and those who have sped many parting souls know that to most the end comes as naturally and simply as sleep” (ch. 40). Alcott had nursed in a military hospital and lost a sister, and she is correcting the genre as she writes in it. G. K. Chesterton thought the Professor’s proposal and Jo’s acceptance “one of the really human things in human literature”, and it is also funny: “Not empty now”, she whispers on the steps in the rain, and kisses him under an umbrella (ch. 46).
The burnt thrillers
The most autobiographical strand looks like a moral fable. Jo earns money with her pen, and Part Second is exact about what it buys: “‘The Duke’s Daughter’ paid the butcher’s bill” (ch. 27), and “Curse of the Coventrys” groceries and gowns. In New York she sells sensational tales to the “Weekly Volcano”, and earns well until Professor Bhaer, gravely, over a newspaper, says that he would “more rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash” (ch. 34). She rereads her work and stuffs “the whole bundle into her stove”.
That chapter is a confession with the facts rearranged. Alcott had written such stories herself, for good money, as A. M. Barnard or anonymously: “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” (1863), Behind a Mask (1866). Her girlhood journal says “I fancy ‘lurid’ things, if true and strong also”, and those tales are about women who lie, plot and take power over men. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern traced them only in the 1940s, and they were not collected until the 1970s. So when Jo burns her thrillers, Alcott is burning in fiction the work she preferred, which had helped pay the family’s bills.
What replaces it is this very book. Grieving after Beth’s death, Jo is told by her mother, “write something for us, and never mind the rest of the world” (ch. 42). A simple story comes out and succeeds beyond anything she has done: “There is truth in it, Jo, that’s the secret”. The novel is defending itself here, and Alcott had reason to. Her journal for May 1868 says: “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” Readers took the domestic story for the truth of her, and it was what they asked of her for the rest of her life.
The people
Jo
Jo March is the reason the book survives: a whistling, slangy, scribbling girl who says “I’m the man of the family now papa is away” (ch. 1) and means it. She ends far from the “literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse” she feared becoming (ch. 43), which is what Alcott became; readers wrote to the author as “Miss March”, and she did not correct them.
Meg and Beth
Meg, drawn from Anna Alcott, wants nice things and is allowed to be ordinary: her marriage to a poor tutor gets a comic chapter of housekeeping defeat (ch. 28). Beth is the one who troubles modern readers, a girl so good she is “an angel in the house” (ch. 24) long before she dies. She was drawn from Lizzie Alcott, who died in 1858 at twenty-two, after scarlet fever. When Jo protests, the fictional Beth answers: “It’s like the tide, Jo” (ch. 36).
Amy
Amy is the character readers have changed their minds about. As a child she is a vain little horror who burns the book. As a woman she works out what she wants and how to get it. Her verdict on herself after Rome is as hard as anything in the novel: “talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing” (ch. 39). She then scolds Laurie out of his idleness, marries him, and tells him “I’m learning how to sail my ship” (ch. 44). Her original, May Alcott, illustrated the first edition and had some success as an artist. May died in 1879 after childbirth, and Louisa raised her daughter.
Laurie and the Professor
Laurie is a charming, spoilt, lonely boy, more a brother than a suitor, which is why the proposal fails: “I don’t see why I can’t love you as you want me to” (ch. 35). Friedrich Bhaer is the book’s deliberate affront, a poor, stout, middle-aged German who darns his own socks. Readers of Part First wanted Jo and Laurie, and Alcott’s journal answered: “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.” A letter of 1869 calls the result a “funny match”, made out of perversity, which is the best guide to him.
Mr March
Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist who co-founded the failed Fruitlands community in 1843 and could not keep his family, was very present at home, loud and dictatorial. In the book he becomes an absent chaplain with almost no lines, which may be the most wishful thing in it.
How it was made
Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers asked for a girls’ book, a request Alcott noted in September 1867. She began in May 1868, with her father pressing her. She sent twelve chapters in June, and Niles thought them dull, as she did, until his niece read them and enjoyed them. Part First came out in 1868, and its first printing of 2,000 copies sold out quickly. Alcott delivered the second part on New Year’s Day 1869. In Britain the second part became Good Wives, often still treated as a separate novel.
The text most people read for a century was not quite the one Alcott wrote. In 1880 Roberts Brothers reissued both parts as one volume with chapters numbered through and more than 200 illustrations by Frank T. Merrill, and with numerous small changes. Slang was softened and Jo was tamed: the urge to “box her ears” became an urge to “cry”, and she no longer pounds on Laurie’s door but knocks. Scholars have found no record that Alcott took part. The Project Gutenberg text linked here (#37106) is this 1880 revision, complete, with both parts; the quotations follow it. Project Gutenberg’s other text (#514) has the same revised wording with modernised spelling and some dropped words.
Readers and critics
Simone de Beauvoir said that as a child the book gave her “an exalted sense of myself”. Cynthia Ozick, Patti Smith, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Maxine Hong Kingston and J. K. Rowling have all named it or Jo as an influence. In 2003 the BBC’s Big Read placed it eighteenth among British favourites.
Serious criticism arrived with the feminist scholarship of the 1970s, and it has been split ever since. Sarah Elbert reads Alcott as a reformer whose household models democracy between the sexes. Others think the ending betrays the first half. Barbara Sicherman, who calls the ending unsatisfying, argues that this keeps the book alive, as if a rereading might end differently. The thrillers sharpened the question, since they show that Alcott could write something quite different.
Afterlives
Alcott continued the family in Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Each generation gets its film: George Cukor’s of 1933 with Katharine Hepburn, Mervyn LeRoy’s of 1949 with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor, Gillian Armstrong’s of 1994 with Winona Ryder, Greta Gerwig’s of 2019 with Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh. Gerwig’s is the most critical, taking Amy seriously and ending with Jo bargaining with her publisher over whether her heroine must marry. There have also been a 1998 opera by Mark Adamo for Houston Grand Opera, a 2005 Broadway musical and a 2017 BBC serial by Heidi Thomas. Geraldine Brooks’s March (2005) follows the absent father into the war that Alcott left off the page.
How to read it
- Read both parts. The book’s point is in the second.
- Prefer the first text if you can. The free text is the 1880 revision. Penguin Classics (edited by Elaine Showalter), the Norton Critical Edition and Daniel Shealy’s annotated edition go back to 1868–69, where Jo is noticeably rougher.
- Keep a summary of Bunyan nearby. Titles such as “Jo meets Apollyon” depend on it.
- Watch Marmee. Note what her speeches concede.
Read next
- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The game the March girls are playing, and the frame Part First is hung on.
- Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask (1866). A governess takes over a country house by acting: what Jo is made to burn.
- Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863). Her Civil War nursing, from the weeks that ruined her health.
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847). Another poor girl with a temper, in a novel that takes her side.
- Geraldine Brooks, March (2005). The father’s war, imagined with Bronson Alcott’s own journals and letters behind it.