Little Women

By Louisa May Alcott

Meg is the eldest and on the brink of love. Then there's tomboy Jo who longs to be a writer. Sweet-natured Beth always puts others first, and finally there's Amy, the youngest and most precocious. Together they are the March sisters. Even though money is short, times are tough and their father is away at war, their infectious sense of fun sweeps everyone up in their adventures — including Laurie, the boy next door. And through sisterly squabbles, their happy times and sad ones too, the sisters discover that growing up is sometimes very hard to do.
Based on Louisa May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of nineteenth-century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers.

A wonderful story... As a child, I strongly identified with Jo because she is a writer. —Jacqueline Wilson
The American female myth. —Madelon Bedell
It is an essential American novel, perhaps the essential American novel for girls… Girls come to it on their own. —Jane Smiley
In "Little Women", Alcott anticipated realism by twenty or thirty years. —G. K. Chesterton

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReadOn
• Release date: Jan 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9782291080978

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.