Little Women

I picked up Little Women because I wanted to know why it has stayed in print since 1868 when Roberts Brothers first put it out. I expected something sweet and a little dusty. What I found was longer and livelier than I expected, and more sad in the second half. Alcott set much of it in Concord during the Civil War years, in a small house where four sisters live with their mother while their father serves as a chaplain with the Union Army. The mother is called Marmee by her girls. The sisters are Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March. That house and those five people carry almost the whole book, with a boy from next door and a few kind neighbors filling out the rest.

The book first came out in two parts, and you can feel that shape now. The first part stays close to home. The second part follows the sisters as they leave Concord for work and marriage, then pulls them back. Alcott shows meals and winter colds. She also pauses to tell you what lesson a scene should teach. That habit will either charm you or wear on you.

Christmas in Concord with Marmee

The book opens at Christmas with the father away and money short. The March family used to be well off, but the father lost his property while trying to help a friend, and now they live plainly. Meg works as a governess. Jo works as a companion to a rich and sharp tongued old woman named Aunt March. Beth stays home and keeps house with Hannah the servant. Amy goes to school. On Christmas morning they each have a dollar for a small gift, and they grumble about being poor while girls they know have fine things. Then Marmee reads them a letter from their father, and they decide to spend their small sums on gifts for her instead of on treats for themselves.

That choice sets the tone. Marmee sits with them that evening and talks about wanting them to be good rather than to be rich. She tells them she tries each day to be patient and often fails. That admission keeps her from feeling like a statue. She works for the poor in Concord. When the girls wake on Christmas Day, they find their breakfast is to go to a poor family named the Hummels, who live nearby in real hunger. The girls carry it over through the snow and come home to bread and milk, and later Mr Laurence next door sends over a fine dinner as a surprise. That exchange, from giving away breakfast to receiving dinner, is the book in small form.

Concord feels cold and close in these early chapters. The girls walk to work and school and church. They mend dresses and turn old things into party clothes. Their father writes letters that Marmee reads aloud. The war stays in the background. You hear about hospitals and sewing for soldiers, but the fighting is far off. Alcott keeps the focus inside the house, on tempers and small plans for fun. You learn the layout of the rooms and the habits of each girl before anything large happens.

Four sisters with different wishes

Meg is sixteen when the book starts and is pretty and fond of fine things. She wants a pleasant home and a good marriage, and she tries to act like a young lady even when the family cannot afford it. Jo is fifteen and is the center of the book. She is tall and quick. She loves books and writing and hates the limits placed on girls. She calls herself the man of the family while her father is gone. Beth is thirteen and is shy and gentle. She loves music and her cats, and she dislikes school and strangers. Amy is twelve and is fair haired and fond of drawing. She wants to be an elegant artist and to be admired, and she can be vain and quick to take offense.

Alcott gives each sister a fault to work on, and Marmee names them plainly. Meg struggles with vanity. Jo struggles with temper and rough speech. Beth struggles with shyness that keeps her from the world. Amy struggles with selfishness and pride. The book returns to those faults. Jo says sharp words she wishes she could take back. Amy shows off her limes at school when limes are prized among pupils and gets punished for trading them in class. Meg goes to a party at the Moffats and then feels ashamed. Beth hides when visitors come and then cries because she was rude.

What saves this from feeling like a lecture is how much fun the sisters have together. They start the Pickwick Club, named after the Dickens book, and write a little paper with ads and stories. They act plays in the attic and dress up in old clothes. Jo writes wild adventure tales and reads them aloud while Beth plays the piano and Amy draws the scenes and Meg sews costumes. You see affection in the teasing. Jo calls Amy a goose and Amy calls Jo a fright, and both laugh. When they fight, as Jo and Amy do over burnt manuscripts and hurt pride, the fights feel like real sibling fights rather than staged lessons.

Laurie and Mr Brooke come close

Theodore Laurence, called Laurie, lives next door with his grandfather Mr Laurence. Laurie is rich and lonely and bored by tutors and strict rules. He sees the March girls through a window and wants what they have, which is noise and warmth. Jo meets him first at a party when she gets a scorched dress and hides behind a curtain, and Laurie makes her laugh and shields her from notice. From then on he is half brother and half neighbor. Mr Laurence hears Beth playing on his unused piano and invites her to come and play it. He later gives her the piano outright because her music pleased him and because his own dead granddaughter used to play it. Beth, who can barely speak to strangers, plays for him with tears in her eyes.

Laurie fits into the house the way a cousin might. He studies with the girls and joins their plays and carries messages. He teases Jo and protects Beth. His tutor John Brooke, called Mr Brooke, is quieter and older. He meets Meg when he carries her home after she sprains an ankle, and he keeps meeting her on walks and at the house. He is poor and plain and steady. Meg likes him, though she tells herself she should aim higher. Jo watches this with alarm because she wants Meg to stay home forever and wants no man to take her sister away.

Alcott shows courtship through small signs. Mr Brooke keeps Meg's glove. He stands near her at parties. He goes to the war later and writes letters. Laurie watches Jo and copies her moods. Marmee watches all of it and says little until she must. Some readers find this section slow because little seems to happen beyond visits and walks. I found it true to how families sense change before it arrives. A look lasts too long. A name comes up too often. Jo feels the house shifting and tries to hold it still by being louder than before.

Scarlet fever changes the house

The first hard turn comes when Marmee is called to Washington because Mr March has fallen ill with pneumonia while working in the hospital. She must leave Concord at once. Meg and Jo and Amy and Beth are left to keep house with Hannah. Beth goes each day to see the Hummel family, where a baby is sick. The baby has scarlet fever. Beth catches it while caring for them. She had been run down for weeks, and the fever takes hold fast.

Jo nurses her. Laurie brings food and runs errands. Amy is sent away to Aunt March for safety because she has not had the fever, and Amy hates it there because Aunt March is strict and the house is dull. The letters from Washington grow short and worried. Marmee cannot come home yet. Beth grows worse, and for a night the doctor says plainly that the crisis may turn either way. Jo sits by the bed and promises to be better if Beth lives. Then the fever breaks. Beth sleeps quietly and wakes weak but alive. Marmee arrives late that same night in a storm, and Laurie meets her at the station and brings her home. Alcott holds the reunion back until Beth is safe and then lets the mother and children hold each other without many words.

This illness leaves a mark on Beth that never fully lifts. She recovers slowly and remains pale and tired. She cannot walk far. The doctor later says her system never cleared the strain, and her heart is weak. At the time the family is only glad she lived. Jo cuts her hair and sells it to help pay for Marmee's trip, which shocks Amy and makes Laurie stare, and Jo cries in private because vanity is harder to kill than she pretends. Meg runs the house. Amy writes funny letters from Aunt March about dull dinners. The house feels older after Marmee returns. The girls have learned they can manage without her, and Marmee has learned they had to.

Jo in New York and Amy in Europe

Three years pass, and Alcott moves the story outward. Meg marries Mr Brooke and sets up a small house. The wedding is plain because Meg chooses love over display. Her married life brings new lessons about money and temper. She buys silk for herself when money is tight and hides it from her husband. She and John quarrel and then make up when Marmee tells Meg that love must be tended with work and plain talk. Their twins, Demi and Daisy, fill the small house with noise. Jo loves them but feels the distance growing between her and Meg, who now belongs to another home.

Jo wants to write and to earn. She goes to New York to teach in a boarding house run by Mrs Kirke. There she meets Professor Friedrich Bhaer, a German tutor who is poor and kind. He corrects her grammar and lends her books. He thinks her early stories for weekly papers are flashy and false, written only to earn dollars, and he says so without cruelty. Jo is angry at first and then sees he is right. She stops writing cheap thrills and tries for truer work, though she earns less. He mends her clothes and shares his small supper. Jo likes him more than she admits, but she tells herself she will never marry because she wants to care for Beth and to keep her freedom.

Amy gets the chance Jo wants in another form. Aunt March takes Amy to Europe instead of Jo, because Amy is polished and draws well. Amy travels through London and Paris and studies art and copies pictures and learns that she has taste but not genius. That admission costs her pride and steadies her. Laurie is also in Europe, idle and drifting after leaving college. He follows Amy from place to place and leans on her for company. Amy sees his drift and tells him plainly that he must do something useful instead of waiting for feeling to move him. Her scolding works where praise did not. Laurie begins to work in earnest and to think less of himself.

Beth, marriages, and a school

Beth never regains strength. She tires after short walks. She sits with her cats and her piano. Jo watches her with growing fear and takes her to the seashore for fresh air, but Beth knows what Jo cannot yet say. She tells Jo she is not afraid and that she has tried to be good and hopes it was enough. Laurie sends fruit and writes cheerful letters, but even he grows grave when he sees her. Beth dies at home with her family near, plainly and gently, after giving her few treasures to her sisters. Alcott writes the death without show. One evening Beth is there, and then the house feels empty in the middle of its noise.

The marriages that follow still divide readers. Amy and Laurie marry in Europe after long talks about work and home. Laurie had once loved Jo and asked her to marry him, and Jo refused him kindly because she loved him as a friend. Laurie grieved and then grew up. Amy came to love the steadier man he became. Jo marries Professor Bhaer after his return to Concord. He is much older and poor, and some readers feel the match punishes Jo for her spirit. Alcott herself felt pressed by readers and by her publisher to marry Jo to someone, and she chose the kind man who respected Jo's mind over the rich boy who adored her wildness. I read it as a truer match than it first looks, though I wish Alcott had let Jo keep more edge after marriage.

Aunt March dies and leaves Jo her house called Plumfield. Jo and Professor Bhaer turn it into a school for boys, with room for their own two sons Rob and Teddy. They take in poor boys as well as paying pupils and let them run and learn with kindness rather than fear. Laurie and Amy live nearby with their daughter Beth, named for the sister they lost, and help with money and fun. Meg and John live close with Demi and Daisy and visit often. The school is Jo's answer to the question the book has asked from the start, which is how to live a useful life without giving up warmth.

Fair criticism belongs here because the book asks for it. The moralizing can tire a modern reader. Alcott stops scenes to explain what you should learn, and Marmee's talks sometimes sound like sermons set into story. The pace sags in the middle of the second part, with long letters and visits that repeat the same lesson about patience. The marriage endings feel forced if you wanted Jo to stay single and write in the city. Amy's growth in Europe can feel quick after years of vanity, and Laurie's change can feel told rather than shown. Yet the core holds. The talk between mothers and daughters still sounds honest. The grief for Beth still lands because Alcott built it from small signs rather than sudden shock. If you want a novel where people learn slowly through work and care, and where Concord in wartime feels close enough to touch, this one earns its place. You will still likely remember Jo selling her hair and Beth playing in the empty house next door.