Little Women

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March grow up genteel but poor in Massachusetts while their father serves as a chaplain in the Civil War, raised largely by their mother, Marmee, on a mix of practical thrift and moral seriousness the girls each absorb differently. Jo, headstrong and openly ambitious to write, is the book's real center, closest to Alcott herself, and her friendship with the wealthy boy next door, Laurie, deepens through the book until he proposes marriage and Jo, valuing their friendship too much to risk it and unwilling to marry simply because it is expected of her, turns him down, a refusal that shocked and disappointed many of the novel's first readers. Beth, gentle and retiring, contracts scarlet fever nursing a poor neighbouring family and never fully recovers her health, dying quietly partway through the second half of the book in one of the most genuinely mourned deaths in American children's literature. Meg marries for love rather than money despite the strain of managing a household on little income, and Amy, the youngest and most conventionally ambitious of the sisters, eventually marries Laurie herself after growing up abroad, while Jo, resistant to marriage plots throughout, finally accepts a partnership on her own terms with the older, unglamorous Professor Friedrich Bhaer.

Alcott drew the sisters directly from her own family, giving Meg her sister Anna's temperament, Amy her sister May's ambition, and Beth the illness and death of her own sister Lizzie, who died young of complications from scarlet fever; Jo is Alcott's clearest self portrait. Alcott initially resisted writing the book at all, doubting she knew how to write convincingly about anyone but her own sisters, and the resulting novel gains real authority from exactly that closeness, rendering the sisters' quarrels, ambitions, and grief with a specificity that avoided the saccharine tone typical of the genre.