The March sisters, and Jo in particular, stand at the far opposite end of the spectrum. The girls’ homespun stage plays strive to emulate Shakespeare, and their domestic newspaper takes its cues from Dickens. Meg reads Sir Walter Scott, Jo paraphrases Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beth quotes Isaac Watts, Amy fumbles with Greek mythology, and, of course, Alcott herself persistently analogizes the sisters’ moral struggles to the more grandiose adventures of Bunyan’s pilgrim. Apart from Little Women’s ties to Bunyan, of which more will be said later, the book’s literary allusions, taken individually, seem essentially random; there appears to be no particular reason for Meg to be reading Ivanhoe or for art-loving Amy, on her European tour, to take time away from her beloved cathedrals and galleries to visit Goethe’s house or Schiller’s statue. Taken together, however, the dense literary allusions of Little Women add up to something important. We can start with the very fact that the March girls perceive themselves in a world shaped by stories. Stories—at least those that Alcott cites in her novel—have a purpose; they possess a logic that leads toward a goal. Living in a world rich in narratives, one begins to think of one’s existence as a kind of tale, replete with themes, reversals of fortune, and ultimate objectives, patiently striven toward. The fact that the Marches are immersed in narrative adds a substance to their lives that is not only intellectual but also moral. To live meaningfully, they, too, must have stories, of which they are their own authors, daily creating their self-fulfilling, self-affirming narratives.

Alcott’s infusion of literary references into her work also says something about her own ambition. Even at the outset of writing Little Women, when she presumed that her novel would be of no great interest to anyone, Alcott sensed that a novel deserved to be taken no less seriously because it happened to be written for younger readers. By consciously alluding to a wide variety of literary traditions, Alcott was situating her novel within those traditions and making a bold claim for its relevancy as a work of literary art. Generations before T. S. Eliot set forth the proposition in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Alcott understood that writing gains and creates significance through its relation to writings of the past. Through her reading, she was acquainted with the minds of western Europe. Through her personal associations, she knew Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the other leading minds of Massachusetts, which then formed a large part of the mind of America. A great compendium of thought, then, is present in Little Women, and it ventures well beyond the works and writers Alcott could expect her youthful audience to know. Instead of consenting simply to meet her readers where they were, Alcott perceived her work as a stepping-stone toward greater heights. The child who reads Little Women may well become curious to find out what those authors whom Jo admires were up to. Little Women is a wonder of its kind. The vistas onto which it opens are more wondrous still.

Although Little Women was published in two parts, Alcott actually wrote it in three. Her motivations as an author were different as she wrote each one, and understanding her changing intentions is a vital key to divining the subtle shifts in meaning in the novel as a whole. As she wrote her first twelve chapters, Alcott had no expectation that the book would be a success. To the contrary, she held out scant hopes for her manuscript, which she was writing more to oblige her editor, Thomas Niles, than with any hope of pleasing a broader audience. Indeed, Alcott claimed later to have drafted these first dozen chapters merely to prove to Niles that she was not capable of writing a book for girls. If we take Alcott at her word, in these chapters she was least concerned with what the reading public would think of her work. Half expecting that the manuscript would never go farther than her editor’s desk, she presumably wrote without feeling greatly obliged to make herself pleasing to anyone.1

The second phase of the book, comprising the remainder of the chapters in the published Part First, were written with changed expectations. By now Niles had shown the first twelve chapters to his niece, who had found them captivating. Niles urged Alcott forward.