Little Women
Read this if you…
- want a very warm positive pro-family book (this is one I recommended to my mom)
- are reading all the transcendentalists (this one is the least like the others)
- saw the Greta Gerwig film (which is also fantastic)
- want a female dominated book (4 sisters are main characters)
Skip this if you…
- hate families
The lineage through Little Women
- The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Little Women built on it. - *Little Women* opens "Playing Pilgrims" for a reason — Alcott built the whole first volume as a domesticated retelling of Christian's journey - In chapter two each sister is given her own copy of Bunyan's book; its language threads through the chapter titles and the girls' private struggles - Read it first and the March sisters' "burdens" stop being a quaint metaphor and become exactly what Bunyan meant — the load of sin and self you carry toward the Celestial City
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Little Women built on it. - Jo March has a clear literary mother: Brontë's Jane, the heroine the young Alcott loved best - Alcott called *Jane Eyre* a favorite and modeled her teenage first novel on it, even studying Charlotte Brontë's life for inspiration - Read Brontë first to see where the headstrong, plain-spoken heroine begins — the type Alcott then made her own in Jo
Depicted in Art
The four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — posed together in Smith's signature soft-focus watercolor style.
Jessie Willcox Smith, 1923
Professor Bhaer with little Tina perched on his foot, the boarding-house scene that warms Jo to him.
May Alcott, 1869
The four March sisters gathered together — the original frontispiece introducing Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.
May Alcott, 1869
Jo and Beth March together in a tender sisterly moment from Good Wives.
May Alcott, 1869
Jo March in conversation, hand gesturing — a characteristic Merrill portrait of Jo's energy.
Frank T. Merrill, 1880
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
1989
Elaine Showalter's Penguin reads the March sisters against Alcott's own ambivalence about domesticity. A clean, well-annotated text and a sharp introduction that finds the teeth in a book that gets sentimentalized.
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Notable Quotes
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
Screen & Stage
Little Women
Film · 2019
Greta Gerwig
Little Women
Film · 1994
Gillian Armstrong
Little Women
Film · 1933
George Cukor
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th U.S. President, 1858–1919: "I greatly liked the girls' stories… just as I worshiped 'Little Men' and 'Little Women' and 'An Old-Fashioned Girl.'"
- Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher & author of 'The Second Sex', 1908–1986: "I identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual."
- J.K. Rowling, novelist (Harry Potter), b. 1965: "My favorite literary heroine is Jo March."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, novelist, 1929–2018: "She is close as a sister and common as grass."
- Elena Ferrante, novelist (Neapolitan Quartet), b. 1943?: Little Women shaped her as a writer — the book Lila and Lenù read until it fell apart, dreaming of writing their way out of Naples like Jo March.