It is doubtful whether any novel has been more important to America’s female writers than Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” the story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the eighteen-sixties. The eldest is Meg, beautiful, maternal, and mild. She is sixteen when the book opens. Then comes Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo: bookish and boyish, loud and wild. Jo writes plays that the girls perform, with false mustaches and paper swords, in the parlor. Next comes Beth, thirteen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and doomed to die young. She collects cast-off dolls—dolls with no arms, dolls with their stuffing coming out—and nurses them in her doll hospital. Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of the family, and cute, so everybody loves her anyway. The girls’ father is away from home, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. Their mother, whom they call Marmee, is with them, and the girls are always nuzzling up to her chair in order to draw on her bottomless fund of loving counsel. Next door live a rich old man and his orphaned grandson, Laurie, who, when he is home from his Swiss boarding school, lurks behind the curtains to get a look at what the March sisters are up to. Jo catches him spying on them, and befriends him. He soon falls in love with her.
These characters are not glamorous, and the events are mostly not of great moment. We witness one death, and it is a solemn matter, but otherwise the book is pretty much a business of how the cat had kittens and somebody went skating and fell through the ice. Yet “Little Women,” published in 1868-69, was a smash hit. Its first part, in an initial printing of two thousand copies, sold out in two weeks. Then, while the publisher rushed to produce more copies of that, he gave Alcott the go-ahead to write a second, concluding part. It, too, was promptly grabbed up. Since then, “Little Women” has never been out of print. Unsurprisingly, it has been most popular with women. “I read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times,” Cynthia Ozick has written. Many others have recorded how much the book meant to them: Nora and Delia Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephenie Meyer. As this list shows, the influence travels from the highbrow to the middlebrow to the lowbrow. And it extends far beyond our shores. Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt have all paid tribute.
The book’s fans didn’t merely like it; it gave them a life, they said. Simone de Beauvoir, as a child, used to make up “Little Women” games that she played with her sister. Beauvoir always took the role of Jo. “I was able to tell myself that I too was like her,” she recalled. “I too would be superior and find my place.” Susan Sontag, in an interview, said she would never have become a writer without the example of Jo March. Ursula Le Guin said that Alcott’s Jo, “as close as a sister and as common as grass,” made writing seem like something even a girl could do. Writers also used “Little Women” to turn their characters into writers. In Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend,” the two child heroines have a shared copy of “Little Women” that finally crumbles from overuse. One becomes a famous writer, inspired, in part, by the other’s childhood writing.
Long before she wrote “Little Women,” Alcott (1832-88) swore never to marry, a decision that was no doubt rooted in her observations of her parents’ union. Her father, Bronson Alcott (1795-1888), was an intellectual, or, in any case, a man who had thoughts, a member of New England’s Transcendental Club and a friend of its other members—Emerson, Thoreau. Bronson saw himself as a philosopher, but he is remembered primarily as a pioneer of “progressive education.” He believed in self-expression and fresh air rather than times tables. But the schools and communities that he established quickly failed. His most famous project was Fruitlands, a utopian community that he founded with a friend in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843. This was to be a new Eden, one that eschewed the sins that got humankind kicked out of the old one. The communards would till the soil without exploiting animal labor. Needless to say, they ate no animals, but they were vegetarians of a special kind: they ate only vegetables that grew upward, never those, like potatoes, which grew downward. They had no contact with alcohol, or even with milk. (It belonged to the cows.) They took only cold baths, never warm.
Understandably, people did not line up to join Fruitlands. The community folded after seven months. And that stands as a symbol for most of Bronson Alcott’s projects. His ideas were interesting as ideas, but, in action, they came to little. Nor did he have any luck translating them into writing. Even his loyal friend Emerson said that when Bronson tried to put his ideas into words he became helpless. And so Bronson, when he was still in his forties, basically gave up trying to make a living. “I have as yet no clear call to any work beyond myself,” as he put it. Now and then, he staged a Socratic “conversation,” or question-and-answer session, with an audience, and occasionally he was paid for this, but for the most part his household, consisting of his energetic wife, Abba, and his four daughters, the models for the March girls, had to fend for themselves. Sometimes—did he notice?—they were grievously poor, resorting to bread and water for dinner and accepting charity from relatives and friends. (Emerson was a steady donor.) By the time Louisa, the second-oldest girl, was in her mid-twenties, the family had moved more than thirty times. Eventually, Louisa decided that she might be able to help by writing stories for the popular press, and she soon discovered that the stories that sold most easily were thrillers. Only in 1950, when an enterprising scholar, Madeleine B. Stern, published the first comprehensive biography of Alcott, did the world discover that the author of “Little Women,” with its kittens and muffins, had once made a living producing “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “The Abbot’s Ghost or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation,” and similar material, under a pen name, for various weeklies.
Soon, however, a publisher, Thomas Niles, sensed something about Louisa. Or maybe he just saw a market opportunity. If there were tales written specifically for boys—adventure tales—why shouldn’t there also be stories about girls’ concerns, written for them? Girls liked reading more than boys did. (This is still true.) So Niles suggested to Louisa that she write a “girls’ story.” She thought this was a stupid idea. “Never liked girls, or knew many, except my sisters,” she wrote in her journal. But her family was terribly strapped, so what she did was write a novel about the few girls she knew, her sisters, and her life with them.
You can get the whole story from a new book, “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of ‘Little Women’ and Why It Still Matters” (Norton), by Anne Boyd Rioux, an English professor at the University of New Orleans. This is a sort of collection of “Little Women” topics: the circumstances that brought Louisa to write the book and the difficult family on which the loving March family is based. It describes the book’s thunderous success: its hundred-and-more editions, its translation into fifty-odd languages (reportedly, it is still the second most popular book among Japanese girls), its sequels, its spinoffs—the Hallmark cards, the Madame Alexander dolls—and, above all, its fabulous sales. Rioux can’t give us a firm count, because in the early days the book was extensively pirated, and then it went into the public domain, but she estimates that ten million copies have been sold, and that’s not including abridged editions. Perhaps worried about how a “girls’ story” would fare in the marketplace, the publisher persuaded Alcott to take a royalty, of 6.6 per cent, rather than a flat fee, which she might well have preferred. In consequence, the book and its sequels supported her and her relatives, plus some of her relatives’ relatives, for the rest of their lives.
Rioux goes on from the book to the plays and the movies. The first “Little Women” play opened in New York, in 1912, and was a hit. It was soon followed by two silent movies, in 1917 and 1918. (Both are lost.) Then came the talkies, starting with George Cukor’s 1933 version, which cast Katharine Hepburn, hitherto mainly a stage actress, as Jo and helped make her a movie star. Between 1935 and 1950, there were forty-eight radio dramatizations. Toward the end of that run came a second famous movie, Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 version, with June Allyson as Jo, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy, Janet Leigh as Meg, and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. In the past few decades, the most important version has been Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film, with Winona Ryder as Jo, Kirsten Dunst as Amy, and, as Marmee, Susan Sarandon, who had been enshrined as a feminist icon by “Thelma and Louise.” Recently, it was announced that Greta Gerwig, who had such success last year with “Lady Bird,” her directorial début, is at work on a new “Little Women” movie, with Saoirse Ronan, the star of “Lady Bird,” in the lead role. Ronan seems made to be Jo. And those are just the big-screen versions. By the time Rioux’s book went to press, there had been twelve adaptations for American television, and plenty more elsewhere. In 1987, there was a forty-eight-episode anime version in Japan.
The chapter on the adaptations is a lot of fun. First, it teaches you the problems that face filmmakers adapting famous novels. In “Little Women” movies, the actors are almost always too old, because the directors need experienced people to play these interesting youngsters. June Allyson was thirty-one when she played the fifteen-year-old Jo. Then, partly because the actors are worried that they are too old, they accentuate everything to death. In the Cukor “Little Women,” Katharine Hepburn sometimes looks as though she were going to jump off the screen and sock you in the face, so eager is she to convince you that she is a tomboy. Amy’s vanity is almost always overdone, never more so than by the teen actress Elizabeth Taylor, with a set of blond ringlets that look like a brace of kielbasas. Poor, sickly Beth is almost always sentimentalized; Marmee is often a bore. Whole hunks of the plot may be left out, because this is a twenty-seven-chapter book being squeezed into what is usually a movie of two to three hours.
Rioux apparently finished her book before she could see the most recent entry, a three-hour BBC miniseries directed by a newcomer, Vanessa Caswill. This version’s Jo—Maya Hawke, who had had little acting experience but was blessed with good genes (her parents are Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke)—manages to be Jo-like without being unsexy. Most moving, because the roles are so hard to play, are two other characters. Annes Elwy’s freckle-faced Beth seems to carry her death within her, like an unborn child, from the moment we see her. The movie’s other great standout is Emily Watson, whose features have sometimes seemed too childlike for the roles she has played. Here, as Marmee, she is perfect, both a girl and a mother, her waist a little thicker, her face redder, than what we saw in “Breaking the Waves,” in which, at twenty-eight, she became a star. Caswill can’t take her eyes off her, and she gives her an amazing scene that is not in the book. When one of her daughters gives birth—to twins—Marmee is the midwife. At the end of the ordeal, you can read in Watson’s sweaty, exhausted face everything that Alcott hinted at but did not say about how her own mother was left to do everything. Another of Caswill’s additions is a series of dazzling scenes from nature—light-dappled rivers, fat, furry bees circling pink flowers—that could turn you into a Transcendentalist.
Alcott never swerved in her decision not to marry. “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” as she put it. And yet she concluded the first volume of “Little Women” with a betrothal. Meg is proposed to by Laurie’s tutor, John Brook, a good man, and she accepts. Jo, who takes the same position as her creator on the subject of marriage—never!—is scandalized. How could Meg have done such a stupid and heartless thing, and created a breach in the March household? “I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family,” she says. The first volume ends with the family adjourning to the parlor, where they all sit and gaze sentimentally at the newly promised couple—all of them, that is, except Jo, who is thinking that maybe something will go wrong and they’ll break up. Now the curtain falls on the March girls, Alcott writes: “Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given the first act of the domestic drama called Little Women.”
This sounds, now, as though she is teasing her readers, knowing full well that she will shortly receive huge bags of mail demanding that she get going on Part 2. In any case, that’s what happened, and the letter writers wanted to know one thing above all: Whom did the girls marry? Meg is taken, but what about Amy and Beth? Most important, what about Jo? Clearly, Jo had to marry Laurie. Everyone was crazy about her, so she had to be given the best, and wasn’t Laurie the best? He was handsome; he was rich; he spoke French; he loved her. In the final scene of Part 1, as everyone is cooing over Meg and John, Laurie, leaning over Jo’s chair, “smiled with his friendliest aspect, and nodded at her in the long glass which reflected them both.” They’re next, obviously.
Not so fast, Alcott wrote in a letter to a friend: “Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her.” Laurie, as Alcott has been telling us between the lines from the beginning, is a twit. Yes, he is handsome, and rich, but he is not a serious person. He does not, like Jo, think hard about things and fight his way through them in darkness.
So Jo does what she has long known she would have to do. She tells Laurie that she can’t love him otherwise than as a friend. She breaks his heart, insofar as a heart like his can be broken. Then, perhaps to relieve herself of guilt, she takes to thinking that Beth, her favorite sister, is in love with him. Beth has told Jo she has a secret, which she cannot tell her just yet. That must be the secret! That Beth loves Laurie! The thing for Jo to do, then, is to get out of the way. So she takes a job as governess to two children of one of her mother’s friends, who runs a boarding house in New York City.
On her second day there, she is doing her needlework when she hears someone singing in the next room. She pulls aside the curtain and discovers a man named Friedrich Bhaer, who, we are told, was a distinguished professor in his native Germany but is now a tutor of German, poor, and getting on in years (forty). He is stout; his hair sticks out every which way. His clothes are rumpled. He and Jo become friends, but there is a bump in their road. Jo, like her creator, writes lurid tales for the newspaper in order to make money. Bhaer sees some of this writing. “He did not say to himself, ‘It is none of my business,’ ” Alcott writes. He remembered that Jo was young and poor, and “he moved to help her with an impulse as quick and natural as that which would prompt him to put out his hand to save a baby from a puddle.” He tells her that it is wrong to write such trash. Jo has great respect for Professor Bhaer. She listens to what he has to say, goes back to her room, and consigns all her upcoming stories to the fire.
Soon, Jo gets the news that Beth is seriously ill. This was Beth’s secret: not that she was in love with Laurie but that she was dying. Jo rushes home and nurses her sister for the short time that remains to her. Beth dies without much protest, whereupon the book sinks for a while into a rather boring peacefulness. The world of the Marches becomes gentle, kind—beige, as it were—as if nothing could bring back the hour of real happiness, so we’re all just going to get used to half measures. Amy is in Europe, where Laurie tracks her down, and the two fall quietly in love, or in like. They marry in Paris. Jo, at home with her parents, tries to content herself by doing the household chores that were once Beth’s. She has nothing else.
Then the novel starts to build toward one of the most satisfying love scenes in our literature. Professor Bhaer suddenly arrives at the March house. He tells Jo that he has been offered a good teaching job in the West, and that he has come to say goodbye. But, strange to say, this formerly untidy man now seems quite soigné, in a new suit and with his hair smoothed down. “Dear old fellow!” Jo says to herself. “He couldn’t have got himself up with more care if he’d been going a-wooing”—whereupon, oh, my God, she suddenly realizes what’s going on. For two weeks, Bhaer calls on her every day. Then, abruptly, he vanishes. One day, two days, three days pass. Jo starts to go crazy. Finally, she runs to town to look for him. It turns out that Bhaer had come in order to find out whether or not Jo was promised to Laurie, and he overheard something that gave him the impression that she was. Now he finds her in some rough part of town—warehouses, counting houses—where, as even he can figure out, she is searching for him. “I feel to know the strong-minded lady who goes so bravely under many horse noses,” he says to her. I don’t know if this is how German-Americans spoke English in the eighteen-sixties, but the two innocents eventually make themselves understood. Jo weeps; Bhaer weeps; the sky weeps. Great sheets of rain come down on them. They stand there in the road, completely drenched, looking into each other’s eyes. “Ah,” Bhaer says. “Thou gifest me such hope and courage, and I haf nothing to give back but a full heart and these empty hands.” “Not empty now,” Jo says, and she puts her hands in his. We then see what we have never seen before in this book, and won’t see again: a serious kiss between a man and a woman.
Ravishing as this is, it still disappointed many of Alcott’s contemporaries, because Jo didn’t marry Laurie. And it has disappointed many of our contemporaries, too, because why did Jo, our hero, have to marry at all, not to speak of marrying a man who told her to stop writing? The problem is made worse by the fact that Alcott herself appeared to vacillate. It seems unlikely that anyone would honor her claim that she came up with a “funny match” for Jo in order to spite the fans who were demanding a marriage plot. But this may actually have been the case, because she goes back and forth about matrimony. On one page, Marmee, the font of all wisdom, tells Meg and Jo that to be loved by a good man is the best thing that can happen to a woman, but, a few sentences later, Marmee says that it is better to be happy old maids than unhappy wives. Which did Alcott believe? Was she just fooling around? If so, she left a lot of confused feminists in her wake. Even more displeased were the queer theorists. In an 1883 interview, Alcott said, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body . . . because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with a man.” Hmm. And so we are not surprised that she herself did not marry, but then why did she have to force a husband on her most Louisa-like character, and one who had expressed similar sentiments? (“I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy,” Jo says, in the novel’s first scene.) In recent “Little Women” scholarship, all this bewilderment was compounded by postmodern critics’ emphasis on ambivalence, on conflict, on the dark truths lurking in what had once seemed clean, honest books.
Rioux tries to make everything O.K. by saying that, if Jo married, at least she didn’t make a would-be romantic match, the kind that women have been historically bamboozled by, but a “companionate union.” Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, a children’s-literature scholar, has offered a more negative view: “Seeing no way to satisfy self, she adopts a policy of selflessness and, thus diminished, succumbs to the marriage proposal of fatherly Professor Bhaer.” Both interpretations assume that Jo, by marrying someone old and fat—a foreigner, too!—doesn’t so much take a husband as find a nice person to room with. I think that the situation is exactly the opposite, and that a “diminished” girl does not go running through the town, under so many horse noses, to find a booby prize. The heavens do not burst open when Meg says yes to John, or Amy to Laurie, but only when Jo and Bhaer, these two souls with no money or beauty or luck, come together.
There are other clues that Bhaer is a character very close to Alcott’s heart. When Jo, on her second day in New York, hears the professor singing in the next room, Alcott tells us what the song is. It was originally sung by a strange little character, Mignon, in Goethe’s 1795 novel, “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.” Mignon is a girl dressed as a boy, who, having been kidnapped in her native Italy by a gang of ruffians, is travelling with a troupe of actors. They treat her badly. She appeals to Wilhelm Meister to rescue her. Here, in Thomas Carlyle’s translation, is the start of the poem, “Kennst Du das Land,” that she sings to him:
At first, it sounds as though Mignon is asking Wilhelm to take her back to Italy, but as the poem proceeds it becomes clear that she means someplace farther away. (She dies at the end of the book.) The poem was set to music by dozens of composers in the nineteenth century. Alcott does not tell us which version Bhaer is singing. All we know is that he is speaking of some lost paradise—such as, for example, the Eden that Bronson Alcott tried to emulate at Fruitlands. Goethe was an idol of the members of the Transcendental Club, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emerson, generous as ever, had given Louisa the run of his library when she was in her teens. There she found a translation of a book, “Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child,” a collection of enraptured letters to the revered master from a young admirer, Bettina von Arnim. Louisa decided that she, likewise, would write a “heart-journal.” She would take the part of Bettina, and her correspondent would be Emerson, whom she adored. Years later, in her diary, she recalled, “I wrote letters to him, but never sent them; sat in the tall cherry-tree at midnight, singing to the moon till the owls scared me to bed; left wild flowers on the doorstep of my ‘Master,’ and sang Mignon’s song under his window in very bad German.”
When Bhaer arrives to visit the Marches, Jo asks him to sing “Kennst Du das Land” again. The first line, Alcott writes, was once Bhaer’s favorite, because, before, “das Land” to him meant Germany, his homeland. “But now,” Alcott writes, “he seemed to dwell, with peculiar warmth, and melody, upon the words ‘There, there, might I go with thee / O, my beloved, go’ and one listener was so thrilled by the tender invitation that she longed to say that she did know the land,” and was ready to start packing. These, I believe, are the fragments still floating in the air of “Little Women” after the combustion that, in Alcott’s brain, produced Professor Bhaer, a lover for her most cherished character. He is not a “funny match.” He, together with Beth, is a sort of angel, like the souls in the Divine Comedy, beings who turn to us and say exactly who they are and what they stand for.
Behind these two angelic beings stands another, this one not a literary character but a real person: Bronson Alcott. It is hard to like Bronson, because he took so little care of his family. For a long time, Louisa appears to have despised him, or at least regarded him with considerable irony. She once wrote to him that her goal in her work was to prove that “though an Alcott I can support myself.” It would be hard to find an English-language work of fiction more autobiographical than “Little Women.” For almost every person in Louisa’s immediate family, there is a corresponding character, an important one, in this book. The one exception is Bronson. Father March comes home from the war, stumbles into the back room, and thereafter mostly stays offstage, reading books. Occasionally, he wanders in and says something or other. Then he wanders back out. In one sense, we could say that Louisa erased him—a sort of revenge, perhaps. In another sense, this may just be an erasure of her feelings about him: she didn’t want to talk about it.
Yet, while Bronson was more or less written out of the book, the ideals to which he held so stubbornly inform every page. Bronson’s obsession was with the transcendence of the material world, with seeing through appearances to a moral and spiritual truth. He took this passion to extremes, and that is what made him eccentric, not to speak of irresponsible. But that is also the cast of mind that, with the addition of common sense and humor and an attachment to regular things—life, family, dinner—makes Alcott’s most admirable characters admirable.
In addition to supplying the book’s moral architecture, Bronson provided, by his neglect, the need for its creation. Louisa’s one wish, as an adult, was to make her mother’s life comfortable. With “Little Women” she did it, and then, with the work’s two sequels—“Little Men” (1871) and “Jo’s Boys” (1886), both having to do with a school that Jo and Bhaer eventually establish—she did it some more. When she was in the middle of a book, she wrote “in a vortex,” as she put it, often remaining at her desk for fourteen hours a day. “Little Women” was written in less than six months. “Her health is by no means yet restored,” Bronson wrote philosophically in his journal in 1869, soon after the book’s publication. But it didn’t bother him that she had just about killed herself to write it. In the words of his excellent biographer, John Matteson, Bronson regarded a physical person as “a lapsed soul, a debased descendant of pure being.” A soul did not need to go to bed. A soul could work fourteen hours a day.
Louisa eventually developed chronic health problems, and her exhaustion showed in her work. “Little Men” is occasionally touching. You cry, and you wish you hadn’t, because the book also feels like “The Three Bears,” with the plumped-up beds all in a row. As for “Jo’s Boys,” it is actually a chore to read. Alcott tries to whip up some excitement—there is a shipwreck, an explosion in a mine—but you can sense how bored she is, and how much she wants to go upstairs and take a nap.
In time, Louisa seems to have forgiven her father. At the age of fifty-five, she went to visit him at the convalescent home where he was then living (at her expense, no doubt). Kneeling at his bedside, she said, “Father, here is your Louy. What are you thinking of as you lie here so happily?” “I am going up,” he said. “Come with me.” She obliged him. Three days after their conversation, Bronson breathed his last. But Louisa never knew of it; she was in a coma, after a stroke, and died two days after him.
Of some novelists it is said that they had only one book in them, or only one outstanding book. Such novels tend to have certain things in common. They are frequently autobiographical: Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” Sybille Bedford’s “A Legacy,” Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” And they often have a force or a charisma, an ability to get under your skin and stay there, that other books, even many better-written books, don’t have. Some people complain that university syllabuses don’t accord “Little Women” the status of “Huckleberry Finn,” which they see as its male counterpart. But no piece of literature is the counterpart of “Little Women.” The book is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel. ♦
An earlier version of this piece misstated the name of Meg March’s suitor.
