Little Women

Written by Louisa May Alcott

Narrated by Connie Booth

Little Women is constructed as a series of episodes which are almost complete stories in their own right. Incidents in the lives of the March sisters act as fables, each illustrating a moral point. In her novel, Louisa May Alcott describes her characters' daily lives, creating a patchwork picture of genteel poverty in mid-19th-century America. Meg works as a governess, Jo as a companion and all the women of the family sew, knit, mend and engage in charitable works. So, Alcott creates a true-to-life backdrop to her engaging tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780000978

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. Born in Philadelphia to a family of transcendentalists—her parents were friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau—Alcott was raised in Massachusetts. She worked from a young age as a teacher, seamstress, and domestic worker in order to alleviate her family’s difficult financial situation. These experiences helped to guide her as a professional writer, just as her family’s background in education reform, social work, and abolition—their home was a safe house for escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad—aided her development as an early feminist and staunch abolitionist. Her career began as a writer for the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, took a brief pause while she served as a nurse in a Georgetown Hospital for wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War, and truly flourished with the 1868 and 1869 publications of parts one and two of Little Women. The first installment of her acclaimed and immensely popular “March Family Saga” has since become a classic of American literature and has been adapted countless times for the theater, film, and television. Alcott was a prolific writer throughout her lifetime, with dozens of novels, short stories, and novelettes published under her name, as the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, and anonymously.