Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: A Full Summary and Guide
What Little Women is about
Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in two volumes, the first in 1868 and the second in 1869. It follows four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, from childhood into adulthood in a Massachusetts neighbourhood loosely based on Concord. The story is drawn from Alcott's own life with her three sisters, which is why it is usually described as autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.
The family lives in genteel poverty. Mr March has lost his money and is away serving as a chaplain with the Union Army during the American Civil War. The girls and their mother, whom they call Marmee, face their first Christmas without him. Marmee asks them to give away their Christmas breakfast to the Hummels, a poor family nearby. The sisters take baskets of food, help patch broken windows and leave firewood. That evening their wealthy elderly neighbour, Mr Laurence, sends over a lavish surprise dinner in return. The two households become friends, and his orphaned grandson Laurie is drawn into the Marches' circle.
From there the book is less a single plot than a sequence of domestic episodes. Meg tutors four children for a nearby family. Jo acts as companion to her rich great-aunt March at Plumfield. Beth stays at home, too shy for school, and Amy is still a pupil. Two of Jo's stories are printed in the newspaper. Mr Laurence gives Beth a piano. Meg spends a fortnight with rich friends and learns something about vanity and gossip. Word arrives that Mr March is seriously ill with pneumonia, and Marmee leaves to nurse him in Washington.
The main characters
Alcott gives each sister a strength and a matching flaw, and the book works through both. Meg is beautiful and conventional, and she is vain. Jo is a tomboy who writes, and she is hot tempered. Beth is the family peacemaker and a pianist, and she is cripplingly shy. Amy is an artist who longs for elegance and good society, and she is materialistic.
Marmee holds the household together and does most of the moral teaching, usually by example rather than lecture. Mr Laurence is the gruff rich neighbour who softens around Beth. Laurie, his grandson, becomes close to all four girls and closest of all to Jo. John Brooke, Laurie's young tutor, attracts Meg's interest and later confesses his love for her to her parents, who think her too young to marry. Aunt March is the wealthy widow whose money and favour hover over the family. In the second volume, Professor Friedrich Bhaer arrives, a German boarder in New York who is caring for his sister's orphaned nephews.
The themes
Critics have long identified three linked themes in the novel: domesticity, work and true love. The point is that they depend on each other. None of the three on its own gives the heroine her identity, and the book is interested in how a young woman assembles a self out of all of them.
That makes it a coming-of-age story in the fullest sense. The sisters are not simply growing older. They are each trying to correct a fault, choose an occupation and work out what love will mean for them. Money sits underneath everything, since the family's reduced circumstances shape what each girl can realistically want. The scholar Sarah Elbert has argued that Alcott invented a new genre here, taking elements of romantic children's fiction and fusing them with the sentimental novel, and that the book offers the first vision of the "All-American girl", with her different aspects divided among the four sisters.
What happens in the second half
Skip this section if you want the later turns to come as a surprise. Beth catches scarlet fever after visiting the Hummels, where three children die. Jo, who has already had the illness, nurses her. Beth recovers but never regains her full health. Mr March comes home on Christmas Day, and Meg accepts John's proposal on the understanding that they will wait three years.
The second volume opens with their wedding. Meg and John adjust to married life, have twins, and have to learn how to share the work of parenting. Jo publishes more stories and a novel, but is frustrated by the cuts demanded of her and bewildered by the contradictory reviews. Amy is chosen over Jo for a European tour with their aunt. Laurie falls in love with Jo, who loves him as a brother and says so to Marmee. To give him space, Jo spends six months in New York as a governess, takes German lessons from Professor Bhaer, and writes sensational romance stories anonymously for money until his disapproval persuades her to stop.
Why it still matters
The book was an immediate commercial and critical success. Readers wanted more of the characters at once, which is why Alcott finished the second volume so quickly. It appeared in Britain as Good Wives, a title that came from the publisher rather than Alcott. The two volumes were issued together as a single novel in 1880, and Alcott wrote two more books about the March family, Little Men in 1871 and Jo's Boys in 1886.
It has since been translated into many languages and adapted repeatedly for stage and screen. Part of the reason is Jo, a heroine who writes, earns, refuses a proposal and wants adventure. Part of it is the structure, which lets readers of different ages find a different sister to recognise. It suits anyone who likes family novels, nineteenth-century fiction, or stories about work and ambition in a household where money is tight.
