It was a book that she wrote only with considerable reluctance, and it ends far differently from the way she initially conceived. Alcott was prone to observe that everything went “by contraries” with her, and Little Women is, indeed, arguably one of the most paradoxical books in the American canon. Whereas Alcott herself resisted the constraints of conventional femininity, Little Women was held up for generations as a model for young female behavior. Although she grew up among the Transcendentalist avatars of self-reliance, Alcott crafted in her fiction an ideal vision of interdependence. She raised her family out of its chronic indebtedness by publishing fiction that celebrated the virtues of genteel poverty. Both in the circumstances of its creation and in its consideration of the questions of family, womanhood, and moral growth that lie at its core, Little Women is a book supremely rich in surprises. No one was more surprised by Little Women than Louisa May Alcott herself. When Alcott set herself to writing the manuscript, she had no idea that she was about to author an enduring children’s classic, and neither did she imagine that her book would one day be regarded as a pioneering work in the then-nascent movement of American literary realism.

Nevertheless, few readers who come—and come back—to Little Women are looking to be surprised. They come instead seeking assurance. They look for and find a promise that life’s hardships, whether they may take the form of poverty, a family divided by distance and war, or the petty demons that one must subdue within one’s own nature, can be endured and surmounted. And they wish to be reminded that the battle can be won with defenses no more sophisticated than a resolute heart and a loving family. It is not always clear in Little Women that the armor will be thick enough. What reader cannot relate her or his own experience to the fears of Beth, when she timorously ventures into the lair of the imperious Mr. Laurence, or to the inner agonies of Jo as she gradually realizes that she must leave childhood behind and make a name for herself in a large and highly indifferent world? One sympathizes instinctively with the awkwardness of Meg as she is thrust forward into social circles that she hardly comprehends, as well as with Amy’s sense of disgrace when her much-awaited luncheon with her fashionable but fickle drawing class dissolves into a social catastrophe. In all these situations, the easier path would be to run away and avoid the consequences. But running away too often or for too long is seldom realistic, and it is to Little Women’s realism that readers have eagerly responded since the novel first appeared—the first part in 1868 and the second in 1869. Alcott herself believed the story was so good because it was “not a bit sensational, but simple and true”; in her words, “We really lived most of it, and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.”2

Some have challenged Alcott’s assessment of her book’s verisimilitude. They observe that Alcott’s own youth was marred by deeper poverty and tinged with darker emotional tones than the adventures of the March sisters. Nevertheless, compared with much of what preceded it in American popular fiction—and certainly in comparison with earlier books for children and adolescents—Little Women is remarkable for its lack of supernaturalism and fantasy. In calling her book a realistic work, Alcott was much more right than wrong. Even in those parts that Alcott was forced to draw from her rich imagination, Little Women feels imbued with the essences of life and truth.

Although a flavor of autobiography has animated many great works of American fiction, it is hard to think of a classic American novel that is more deeply rooted in actual lived experience than Little Women. Because this is so, the life of the author takes on particular importance. It is not possible truly to know Little Women without getting to know Louisa May Alcott.

A person who came to Concord, Massachusetts, in December 1847 might have met Louisa May Alcott at fifteen, the same age that Alcott’s alter ego Jo March has achieved at the start of Little Women. Such a visitor would have encountered a young woman of athletic skill and startling vitality. No boy could be her friend, Alcott later wrote, until she had beaten him in a footrace, and no girl could win her affections “if she refused to climb trees, leap fences and be a tomboy.”3 With her clear, olive-brown complexion and brown hair and eyes, Alcott suited perfectly what a close friend called “an ideal of the ‘Nut Brown Maid’; she was full of spirit and life; impulsive and moody, and at times irritable and nervous.” The friend went on to observe, “She could run like a gazelle. She was the most beautiful girl runner I ever saw. She . . . dearly loved a good romp.”4 Another acquaintance of Alcott’s youth particularly remembered her face.