Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
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"Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy" by Louisa May Alcott is a coming-of-age novel published in 1868-1869. The story follows four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—as they navigate the passage from childhood to womanhood in Civil War-era Massachusetts. Loosely based on Alcott's own family, the novel explores themes of domesticity, work, and love while depicting the joys and struggles of nineteenth-century women's lives. Through their adventures and challenges, the March sisters embody different aspects of young American womanhood.
About the author
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was an American novelist who wrote Little Women in a few months, at a publisher's request for "a book for girls", and drew it from her own childhood with three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Her family were abolitionists whose house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and she served as a nurse in a Union hospital during the Civil War until typhoid fever ended it. The book's success supported her family for the rest of her life. She also wrote sensation stories under the name A. M. Barnard, a fact not discovered until the 1940s.