The Missouri Review

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You likely know the plot of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868–1869 novel, Little Women. Whether you’ve read the book or seen one of its adaptations for film or screen, you probably have some recollection of the four March sisters’ comings-of-age in New England during and just after the Civil War. Poor but resourceful, the sisters are Meg, who dreams of wealth and fame as an actress but finds fulfillment in marriage and motherhood; Jo, the strong-willed writer, who helps support the family by publishing potboilers, then sets aside her literary aspirations to launch [End Page 191] a boys’ school with her husband, Professor Bhaer; Beth, gentle and musical, who succumbs to scarlet fever; and Amy, the artistic and urbane youngest, who ultimately marries their rich neighbor, Laurie. The girls’ mother, Marmee, shepherds them through the tumult of adolescence with support from Hannah, their housekeeper, and limited counsel from Mr. March, who is away as a chaplain in the Union Army for half the book and absorbed in his own ministerial and philosophical pursuits for the rest.

I read Little Women for the first time in elementary school. My mother had already introduced me to the Marches when my school acquired a complete set of Alcott’s children’s books—Under the Lilacs, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom—in matching green-and-gold bindings. I was then, as I am now, fascinated by the manners and material culture of the nineteenth century, but the books’ stories of growing up with and despite one’s loved ones also captivated me. Simultaneously serious and playful, Alcott’s books seemed more provocative—or provocative of more interesting questions—than did the sordid Sweet Valley High novels shelved nearby. Even now, Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys are among the few books I keep in my bedside table. They’ve remained close at hand not just because of my early identification with Jo, the restless writer, but also because of my later interest in Alcott herself, whose life and career I studied in graduate school.

Before Little Women, Alcott aspired to write serious novels for adults—novels of ideas, such as her first foray, Moods, a female bildungs-roman. Having had a modest success with Hospital Sketches, a lightly fictionalized account of her experiences as a Civil War nurse, she was persuaded by her publisher to try a book for children. The success of that attempt set the course for her career. Little Women earned enough to clear the Alcott family’s persistent debts; what could Louisa do but write more like it—write to the point of exhaustion and beyond? Alcott’s death at age fifty-five in a convalescent home reflects the physical toll of her chronic illness (long identified as mercury poisoning from the calomel she was treated with during her Union Army service, though more recently understood as an autoimmune disorder) and of the financial responsibilities she bore throughout her life. At the time of her death in 1888, the unmarried Alcott was raising her eight-year-old niece, Lulu, whose mother, May Alcott Nieriker, had died in Paris shortly after childbirth. She was also supporting her widowed older sister, Anna, and [End Page 192] her widowed eighty-eight-year-old father, Bronson, who predeceased her by less than forty-eight hours. Alcott had legally adopted Anna’s younger son, John Sewell...