Sparked by his enthusiasm, she responded with a torrent of chapters. With “a head full of pain from overwork,” she completed Part First in a matter of weeks. The book was now plainly a profit-making venture—of high quality, to be sure, but more calculated than before to appeal to a commercial audience. When Alcott wrote Part Second of Little Women, the portion published in 1869 and sometimes known as “Good Wives,” her motivations were at their most complex. On the one hand, the public’s eager reception of Part First had filled Alcott with unprecedented confidence. On November 1, the day she started the sequel, she wrote, “A little success is so inspiring that I now find my ‘Marches’ sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play.” The virtual certainty that readers would line up to buy the concluding half of Little Women helped her feel she could create more boldly. At the same time, however, knowing that she had a public to please weighed irksomely upon her.

The effects of Alcott’s changing intentions for the book that became Little Women are observable in the novel itself. The first dozen chapters, which, surprisingly, Alcott initially considered “dull,” contain some of the liveliest and most memorable scenes in the entire novel. It is here that the girls take to their homemade stage in “The Witch’s Curse”; that Jo’s angry neglect causes Amy to fall through the ice; that Meg’s fancy curls, the victims of an ineptly wielded iron, go up in smoke; and that Beth conquers both her shyness and the heart of old Mr. Laurence. In these chapters, writing with no great anticipation of success, Alcott wrote with little affectation. The tale is told with a simplicity that is charmingly mimetic of the innocence of the March sisters themselves—a naïveté that will slowly evaporate as the girls gain more knowledge of the world. These chapters feel as if Alcott drafted them at least in part for her own amusement, freely weaving memories of her youth with the brightest strands of her imagination and infusing all with an ethical understanding that comes to people looking back on their early years.

The first twelve chapters of Little Women are among Alcott’s most perfect creations, but they are not yet a novel. Each can be read almost independently, as one might read a loosely connected series of short stories. If there is a unifying question in these chapters, it is only whether the girls will behave in a way that their father will find sufficiently pleasing when he returns home—an interesting query but perhaps a trifle thin to sustain an entire book. Probably sensing that her ideas lacked an inner cohesion, Alcott was able to find an appearance of overall direction only by grafting her tales onto a preexisting structure, supplied by her pervasive allusions to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was evidently only after Thomas Niles revised his first opinion of the work that Alcott began to think more broadly about turning Little Women into an integrated, comprehensive whole. The change is evident in “Castles in the Air,” the first chapter Alcott wrote after the initial dozen. In that chapter, Laurie and the March sisters begin to think, however fancifully, about their lives beyond the immediate future. Except for the humble ambitions of Beth, who wants only to live at home and care for her parents, the goals that they imagine for themselves are exuberantly unrealizable, and that’s part of the fun. Nobody really expects Amy to become the world’s greatest artist or Jo to acquire a magic inkstand. But even the wildest dreams tell some truth about those who dream them, and, much more clearly than before, we see Meg, Jo, and Amy as vessels of ambition. “Castles in the Air” brings a pair of key questions to the fore: To what extent, if at all, will each girl succeed in realizing her ideal vision of herself? And, having fully vested the girls with heartfelt desires, how far is Alcott prepared to go in letting them pursue those aspirations?

These matters are especially interesting to readers who have perceived a tension since the novel began: from the moment the girls are called upon to give away their Christmas breakfasts to the destitute Hummels, they have continually been forced to choose between doing their duty to others and gratifying their self-centered desires. It seems inevitable that, for poor girls like the Marches, further sacrifices will be demanded and that the sisters will be asked to lay aside not just a holiday meal, but their most cherished dreams and wishes. Henceforth, the March sisters’ task will never again be quite so simple as pleasing their parents. They will need to fashion mature lives that will be acceptable to others but will also be satisfying to themselves. Those seeking an early hint as to how the contest between self and others might go may have found an uneasy omen in the fact that the girls divulge their dreams in the unlucky Chapter XIII. It is at this moment that the story of the March girls acquires the shape and direction that is necessary for a novel. In some ways, it is also here that their story begins to matter.

It is also in the second half of Part First that the distant horror of the Civil War transforms into a critical concern. Until now the war has chiefly been a plot device for keeping Mr. March offstage.