The Mother of All Girls' Books: The secret subversiveness of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
Deborah Weisgall
June 11, 2012
"Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.” This is how Louisa May Alcott begins Little Women. She wrote it in 1868, when she was 35, after months of urging by Thomas Niles, a Boston publisher who wanted a story for girls. She had not had much luck with a serious novel, she needed money, and it was part of a deal that her father, Bronson Alcott, had proposed. If Louisa said yes, Niles would agree to publish Bronson’s philosophical treatise, Tablets. A dutiful daughter, she couldn’t say no.
I know the novel by heart. I read it for the first time when I was nine years old; my father bought me a British edition of the first part—the original Little Women. (Good Wives, the second part, appeared just over six months later. In America, the two parts were immediately combined, but in England, they are still published separately.) We were living on a hill above Florence, Italy, but Concord, Massachusetts, where the story is set and where the Alcotts lived, became for me the most exotic town in the world.
The book begins on Christmas Eve during the Civil War. Four sisters sit in the parlor waiting for their adored mother to come home. I skipped over the illustrations because the girls were so vivid on the page that I knew exactly what they looked like. Jo sprawls on the floor like a boy, voicing a secular notion of Christmas: The day is an occasion for gifts, not worship. She is tantalizing and subversive; she flares with anger at the family’s poverty. Jo’s pretty older sister, Meg, only sighs at her shabby dress. Amy, the youngest, is peeved that she can’t have every pretty thing she wants. Sweet Beth is the peacemaker: “We’ve got mother and father and each other.”
“The characters were drawn from life,” Louisa May Alcott later wrote to an acquaintance, and the book ebbs and flows between actual event and authorial desire. The novel records the anguish of Louisa’s struggle to control her impatience and rash temper—a struggle she shared with her mother. In life, the family—Bronson and his wife, Abigail May, and their four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May—built a precarious fortress of love, duty, and pride around themselves. With her art, Louisa secured that stockade. She locked inside it her idealized family—and especially her father, whom she rendered saintly and benign for all the world to see.
http://prospect.org/article/mother-all-girls-books
= new reply since forum marked as read
So disappointed, I read it over again hoping maybe I'd misunderstood. lol
Jo wasn't in love with Laurie, no matter how much we wanted her to be. At least Alcott didn't kill him off or strike him blind for wanting to marry her. It could have been worse. 
It will still be annoying in some ways, so far away from where we are.
But it was so far ahead of where anyone was when it was written.
Amy was annoying, Meg was only interested in dating, Beth was just too good to be true. Jo was cool. On the other hand, Amy was not punished because she wanted a life of her own, Meg's goal of domestic happiness was supported, poor Beth died but her life wasn't put up as some kind of standard and Jo got to be what she was.
Alcott could have been 'way meaner than that.
