Little Women
$16.80
- Paperback
560 pages
- Release Date
1 February 1998
Summary
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read, Little Women, the adored classic of four devoted sisters, was loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s own life. In fact, Alcott drew from her own personality to create a heroine unlike any seen before: Jo, willful, headstrong, and undoubtedly the backbone of the March family. Follow the sisters from innocent adolescence to sage adulthood, with all the joy and sorrow of life in between, and fall in love with them and this endearing story. Praised as “a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal,” Little Women has been an avidly read tale for generations.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780553212754 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0553212753 |
| Author: | Louisa May Alcott |
| Publisher: | Random House USA Inc |
| Imprint: | Bantam Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 560 |
| Release Date: | 1 February 1998 |
| Weight: | 261g |
| Dimensions: | 22mm x 105mm x 174mm |
| Series: | Bantam Classics |
| Audience Age: | 10 |
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Critics Review
“The American female myth.” -Madelon Bedell From the Trade Paperback edition.
“The American female myth.“—Madelon Bedell
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott, a philosopher, school reformer, and utopian from Concord, Massachusetts. Bronson was too immersed in intellectual pursuits to adequately support his family, a responsibility that fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter, Louisa May. While her father lectured and associated with intellectuals like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa worked as a schoolteacher, seamstress, nurse, laundress, and even a domestic servant at age nineteen. The meager earnings from these jobs often prevented her family from falling into complete destitution. However, it was through her writing that she ultimately achieved financial independence for them. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,” she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”
An enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals from the age of ten, Alcott wrote her first melodrama at fifteen and began publishing poems and sketches at twenty-one. Her brief service as a Civil War nurse led to the publication of Hospital Sketches (1863). She also found success writing lurid thrillers under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, beginning in 1861. These tales, featuring strong-willed heroines, were not attributed to Alcott until the 1940s.
Fame arrived unexpectedly in 1868 when a publisher commissioned her to write a “girl’s book.” Drawing on her childhood memories, she penned Little Women, casting herself as Jo March and her sisters Anna, Abby May, and Elizabeth as Meg, Amy, and Beth. She captured the spirited nature of her family and incorporated real-life incidents, but depicted the March family with a financial comfort the Alcotts never experienced. To her surprise, Little Women resonated deeply with America’s predominantly female readership and became a tremendous success. Encouraged, Alcott continued the story in Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). In 1873, she published Work: A Story of Experience, an autobiographical novel.
As a renowned author, she continued to produce novels and stories while advocating for women’s suffrage and temperance, mirroring her father’s activism for abolitionists. Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott both passed away in Boston in March of 1888.
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