The daughter of Bronson Alcott, a renowned American educationalist, Louisa May Alcott published more than two hundred books but is largely remembered for just one – Little Women. Following the fortunes of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, the daughters of an army chaplain in the American Civil War, the book records both the everyday pleasures and the trials and tribulations of their lives.

Would-be writer Jo has the excitement of getting a story published. The wealthy Mr Laurence and his grandson Laurie become close friends of the family. Laurie’s young tutor falls in love with Meg. A telegram arrives with the bad news that Mr March is hospitalized in Washington DC and Mrs March, partly financed by money from the sale of Jo’s hair, is obliged to travel there to look after him. As the girls, based on Alcott and her own sisters, progress from teenage years to young womanhood, they face further crisis and tragedy. The saintly Beth contracts scarlet fever while visiting sick neighbours and, as the other girls grow up and face the challenges of work and romance, she has to battle with terminal illness. In later life, Alcott wrote in her journal that she was ‘tired of providing moral pap for the young’ and published a number of novels which attempted to deal with what she saw as more adult themes, but Little Women survives and thrives nearly a century and a half after it was first published precisely because it is much more than just a simplistic morality tale.

The novel is set very firmly in the place and period in which it was written – readers can learn much about the social history of mid-19thcentury America from reading Little Women – but it has a universality that transcends both.

Film version: Little Women (starring Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and June Allyson as Jo, 1949); Little Women (with Winona Ryder as Jo, 1994)

Read on
Little Men
Geraldine Brooks, March (a modern Pulitzer Prize-winning novel which takes the father of Alcott’s March family as its central character); Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did; Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House on the Prairie.