Little Women: Illustrated

Louisa May Alcott's highly original tale aimed at a young female market has iconic status in America and never been out of print. Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). The book was written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts. It was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. The novel follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March - and is loosely based on the author's childhood experiences with her three sisters. Little Women was a fiction novel for girls that veered from the normal writings for children, especially girls, at the time. Little Women has three major themes:" domesticity, work, and true love. All of them are interdependent and each is necessary to the achievement of a heroine's individual identity." Little Women itself "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth." Little Women has been read "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well."