1868
Little Women is published
Louisa May Alcott's novel about the four March sisters, written reluctantly and fast, becomes an instant success and a lasting classic.
On September 30, 1868, the Boston firm Roberts Brothers published the first volume of Little Women, a book its author had not wanted to write. Earlier that year, Thomas Niles, a partner at the firm, asked Louisa May Alcott for a novel about girls with broad appeal. She would have preferred to publish a collection of short stories, and she told a friend she knew little about girls except her own sisters. Niles kept pressing, and her father, Bronson Alcott, urged her on as well.
In May 1868 she wrote in her journal that she had agreed to try. Working at Orchard House, the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, she wrote quickly and, by her own account, for money. When she sent Niles the first dozen chapters in June, they both found them dull. Then Niles’s niece read them and enjoyed them, and a group of girls who saw the finished manuscript called it “splendid”. Alcott decided they were the best critics.
The story follows Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in a Massachusetts town while their father serves as a Union chaplain in the Civil War. Alcott drew loosely on her own family, and her sister May, the model for Amy, illustrated the first edition.
Why it matters
The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out quickly, and Roberts Brothers struggled to keep up with orders. Readers wanted more, and Alcott delivered the manuscript of a second volume on New Year’s Day 1869, about three months later. It appeared that year and is known in Britain as Good Wives. The two parts were issued as a single novel in 1880, and she later added the sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys.
Critics have praised the book for its realism and for its portrait of girls playing, arguing, and coming of age in ways that felt fresh and distinctly American. G. K. Chesterton thought Alcott had anticipated literary realism by decades. The book has inspired readers as different as Simone de Beauvoir, who saw herself in Jo, and Patti Smith. The novel has been translated into many languages and adapted again and again, with film versions in 1933, 1949, 1994, and 2019 among them.
Did you know?
The first volume closed by telling readers that whether the curtain ever rose again on the four sisters depended on how they received this “first act”. The answer came fast enough to settle the matter.
