Little Women Illustrated

Daughter of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) spent most of her life in Massachusetts, with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as neighbors.  Her father educated her at his innovative Temple School and at home.  Fruitlands, the utopian community he founded, failed.  The family moved over 30 times before Alcott was in her twenties.

While young, Alcott realized that her father was too impractical to provide for his wife and four daughters.  To help support her family, she taught briefly, worked as a domestic, and wrote potboilers, lurid and violent tales, signed A.M. Barnard.  The stories, published in The Atlantic Monthly, featured imaginative, strong, and self-reliant women.

Alcott was a volunteer Civil War nurse.  Contracting typhoid fever from an unsanitary hospital, she was never completely well again.  Her first taste of fame came with the publication of her letters in book form, Hospital Sketches (1863).

To meet family needs, Alcott worked 14 hours a day and produced the semi-autobiographical novel, Little Women, followed by two sequels, Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys, (1871) and Jo’s Boys and How They Turned Out (1886).  Alcott also published other domestic narratives: An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag (6 vols, 1872-82), Eight Cousins (1875), and Rose in Bloom (1876).

Containing extreme poverty, religious radicalism, marital strife, suicidal thoughts, and possible mental illness, the full story of the Alcotts could not be represented in a book for young people.

Except for a European tour in 1870 and a few shorter trips to New York, Alcott spent the last two decades of her life in Boston and Concord.  Late in life, she adopted her namesake, Louisa May Nieriker, daughter of her late sister May, and cared for her increasingly helpless parents.  Her mother died after a lengthy illness in 1877.  Alcott died two days after her father, with whom she shared a birthday.  For many decades, Alcott would be known as “the children’s friend.”

Alcott published the third-person Little Women in two parts in 1868 and 1869, initiating a genre of family stories for young adults.

Loving mother, “Marmee,” raises four daughters in genteel poverty in a Massachusetts town while their father serves as a Union army chaplain in the Civil War.  The teenagers befriend Theodore Lawrence (Laurie), the lonely grandson of a rich, elderly neighbor.  The story follows their pranks, dreams, and growing pains.

Aspiring fiction writer, Jo, a headstrong tomboy, is the main protagonist.  Her eldest sister, the beautiful, vain Meg, marries Laurie’s tutor, John Brooke.  They have twins, Demi and Daisy.  Shy but musical Beth tends to the indigent, sickly Hummel family, then dies from scarlet fever.  After Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal, artistic Amy marries him and they have a daughter, Beth.  Jo marries poor German language professor Friedrich “Fritz” Bhaer and they establish a boys’ school in Plumfield, the home Jo inherits from her wealthy Aunt March.

As the adolescents mature, they learn about their strengths, weaknesses, and gifts.  They navigate social opportunities and obstacles, remaining true to themselves while also being faithful to others.  The sisters struggle with familial duties, personal growth, and gender stereotyping.  Such themes of identity formation and maturation help explain the novel’s enduring relevance.

Peppered with American slang and colloquialisms, Little Women earned nearly unanimous praise.  One critic called it “fresh, sparkling, natural, and full of soul.”  The novel has never gone out of print and today, there are at least 320 English-language versions.  By the 1970s, Little Women had translations in over 50 languages.  Between 1977 and 2009, a further 300 translated editions appeared in over 37 languages.  The number of copies approaches 10 million!

Little Women lives on in many other forms, including radio, theater, film, television drama, and anime.  It also is available in “Castles in the Air,” a recent tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) about Gilded Age stories.

Curator: Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller, Ph.D., Professor of Art History
Assisted by: Sam Yeganeh, Ph.D. candidate in Architecture; Adjunct Faculty, DAAP and Miami University