Little Women’s Cultural and Literary Influence
Little Women IS arguably the most influential book ever written by an American woman. Its nearest contenders—Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind—cannot match its persistent impact. It has never gone out of print or fallen out of favor. Yet, like those other books, its literary status has been suspect. “With its overt mix of autobiography and invention,” novelist and critic Deborah Weisgall has written, “Little Women is an enduring model for women’s stories, but it is rarely considered literature itself.”1 I agree with her that it should be, and I would add that it is precisely because of Little Women’s status as a model for women’s and girls’ stories that it has been excluded from the category of literature. More than that, it has challenged our very ideas of what is considered “literature.”
In the first few decades after its publication, Little Women was accorded critical respect in literary histories where Alcott appeared alongside male luminaries such as Hawthorne and Emerson. But at the turn of the century, as the academic study of American literature professionalized, Alcott largely dropped from view. A 1907 essay by British critic G. K. Chesterton suggests why. His first instinct when confronted with Alcott’s popular novels was to run “screaming” in the other direction, but he persevered and discovered that although “they were extremely good,” there was little he could say about them. As a man, “I am the intruder,” he admitted, “and I withdraw. I back out hastily, bowing.”2 And that is pretty much what the male critical establishment did with Alcott for most of the twentieth century.
She wasn’t the only significant writer ignored. The American literary canon became increasingly exclusive until it was limited to male writers. By 1941, when Harvard professor F. O. Matthiessen published his enormously influential The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, he effectively whittled the nineteenth century down to only five authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Alcott is listed in the book’s index, but the entry refers to Bronson, not Louisa. By the mid-twentieth century, Little Women epitomized the kind of book no longer considered worthy of serious attention, for three reasons: it was popular, it was written for children, and it was written by a woman about women’s lives. As a result, critics, when they bothered to notice it at all, could dismiss it as neither requiring nor being conducive to analysis, as Edward Wagenknecht did in his influential book Cavalcade of the American Novel in 1952. Noticeably, being a popular book for kids didn’t hurt Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn much. It still attracted considerable scholarly attention and is often considered a, if not the, “Great American Novel.”3 It would seem that the death knell for Little Women was its status as a girl’s or woman’s book, placing it in another sphere entirely.
That sphere was, frankly, just about everywhere else outside of academia. As we have seen, Little Women was frequently onstage and in the movie houses. It was also a core text in elementary through high schools. Henry James called Alcott “the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room,” and a British critic in 1919 dubbed her “a ‘Jane Austen’ of the schoolroom.” As early as 1893, excerpts were included in a British edition of Stories for the Classroom. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Little, Brown published cheap school editions of Alcott’s novel and De Forest’s play as well as The Louisa Alcott Reader: A Supplemental Reader for the Fourth Year of School. After the novel’s copyright expired, other publishers, eager to meet the high demand from teachers, also prepared school editions. In 1925, when the Federal Bureau of Education surveyed teachers and librarians for their recommendations of books to outfit rural, one-room schoolhouses across the country, their top choice was Little Women. And in 1933, since, as one commentator put it, Little Women “has been a prescribed reading course in the schools of the country,” the National Council of Teachers of English distributed study guides for the RKO film to all of the nation’s nearly 18,000 high schools.4
Children were also reading Little Women outside of school in large numbers. Throughout the first half of the century, polls of young readers’ preferences consistently placed it at or near the top. In 1909 it was schoolchildren’s favorite book, in 1919 and 1926 it ranked first among girls, and in 1927 it was the first choice among teenagers of both sexes who were asked, “What book has interested you the most?” In 1931, girls chose it as the book they would most like to see filmed. At the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, it was voted patrons’ favorite book from 1919 to 1949. And in 1950, it was the favorite of juvenile readers at public libraries in Chicago and California.5
During these years, Little Women was understood as much more than a cozy book for girls. This became especially clear in the 1940s and ’50s when it was enlisted in the worldwide battle for democracy and was upheld as a quintessentially American text. Whereas scholars were defining classic American themes as man’s battle against the wilderness or the individual’s resistance to social conformity, for those outside of academia, books about families (even ones made up of girls) also represented the nation. During World War II, although Little Women was, understandably, not one of the Armed Services editions sent to U.S. soldiers overseas, it was enlisted for other programs at a time when books were viewed as “weapons in the war of ideas.” In 1942, when Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck solicited critics’ suggestions for books to send overseas that would “tell an Asiatic reader the most about the American people,” Little Women was among the fifteen chosen. At least one newspaper described these books as epitomizing the “American way” soldiers were fighting for.6
After the war, the dissemination of Little Women overseas continued. A plan by California schoolchildren to send it and other books to schools in France and Germany was motivated by their desire to export their “American childhoods full of meaning to minds blighted by war and gasping for free air,” as one exuberant reporter put it. In the 1950s Little Women was one of the first texts chosen by the U.S. Information Agency for its Franklin Book Program, which was designed to translate American books and disseminate them in the Arab world for, among other purposes, “provid[ing] information and points of view regarding America, democracy, and the idea of an open society.” Similarly, the 1949 film of Little Women was exported to occupied Japan as part of the campaign by the Central Motion Picture Exchange to promote American culture and values there. It was also included in a list of films drawn up by the Motion Picture Service as suitable for showing behind the Iron Curtain, essentially as part of its Cold War propaganda campaign. In 1971, Little Women was one of the nine children’s books sent by the Library of Congress to Romania for the first “American Library” established by a U.S. embassy in a communist country. And as late as 2003, Little Women was once again exported as a quintessentially American book, this time by First Lady Laura Bush, who brought books “that reflect ‘the values that had to do with living a good life’ ” to a Russian book festival.7
During the Cold War, Little Women had not been welcome in the Soviet Union. Just as Little Women was being promoted as a symbol of American democracy and values, reports of its being banned in the new Communist Bloc began to appear in the Western press. One article indicated that Little Women was “on the list of ‘Marshall Plan exports designed to dull the minds of the masses.’ ” It appears that officials in Russia, Hungary, Germany’s Soviet sector, and elsewhere believed that Alcott’s novel could be a tool of the West in the increasingly hostile battles over the hearts and minds of Europeans. According to a New York Times columnist in 1948, “British and American literary spies report that there has been a wholesale purge of reading material imported from the West” that included Little Women. Another report, under the title “Hungary Bans ‘Little Women’ and Strippers Too,” credited the banning of Little Women to a government’s “morality campaign.”8 While the linkage of Little Women to explicit sexual material seems ludicrous, presumably it was the representation of a nuclear family’s strong ties that made the book immoral in the eyes of communist censors.
In the West, Little Women’s cultural influence began to wane at the same time that traditional family structures began to dissolve. As late as 1968, Little Women was still one of the two most circulated books in the New York Public Library, and a U.K. survey in 1971 also placed Little Women on top. In the following decade, however, its use in schools dropped off, and it was relegated to summer reading lists and eventually to homeschooling courses. By 1988, it had fallen to number twenty-one among American children’s favorite books, and it was taught by less than 5 percent of public schools. Competition had much to do with the decline. Books written for children and teens had multiplied exponentially, and the classics that hung on were kept alive by recent movie adaptations. In a survey of 14,000 Cincinnati schoolchildren in 1974, the leader in every grade category was a book that had been recently filmed for television or the big screen. Little Women was hanging in there, the professor who conducted the study explained, but had suffered due to students’ attraction to television and the movies.9
While Little Women’s popularity with children and educators declined, however, it soared among academics. Suddenly, with the rise of feminism in the 1970s and ’80s, Alcott’s novel was considered a rich text worthy of close attention. New meanings could be pulled out of the text—or more accurately, new tools could be used to analyze it—and that made it appealing to the new crop of feminist literary critics that came out of the 1960s and ’70s. With its themes of relationships between women, the development of women’s identities, women’s suppression of anger, domestic rebellion, women’s literary ambitions, and how gender roles are constructed, Little Women was a core text in the development of feminist literary criticism. Most of the prominent American feminist critics analyzed Little Women, including Nina Auerbach, Ann Douglas, Carolyn Heilbrun, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Elaine Showalter, Judith Fetterley, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.10 When antiquarian book dealers Madeleine Stern and Leona Rostenberg discovered the thrillers Alcott had written under a pseudonym and published them in Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (1975) and other books, they also provided new opportunities to consider what Alcott had left out of Little Women. Though Jo and Marmee must learn to suppress their anger, Alcott’s sensational heroines are allowed to enact revenge and manipulate the men who would oppress them.
New editions of Little Women also positioned it as a book for adults rather than children, featuring introductions by scholars and texts devoid of illustrations. In 2005 it was “inducted,” as critic Deborah Friedell put it, into the Library of America series, which bills itself as the “definitive collection of American literature.” By that time, Little Women could be embraced as both a children’s classic and an important contribution to American literature. The rise of children’s literature as a field of study also helped to enhance Little Women’s status, as did the shift toward viewing popularity and cultural significance as markers of a text’s value. As Friedell wrote in her New Republic review of the Library of America volume, “The adoration that the books [the Little Women trilogy] have inspired from readers is, in fact, the principal claim for their canonization. Alcott’s novels reside in the artistic category of relics that have been of such enormous influence that the question of their quality seems almost beside the point.”11 In fact, the idea of strictly “literary” value had become too nebulous, and feminist critics argued it was laden with male bias.
Yet, in spite of Little Women’s elevation to canonical status, scholars still do not sufficiently acknowledge how key Little Women has been to the development of women’s literary traditions in the United States and abroad. It has been a foundational text not only in the history of women’s literature but also in individual writers’ very conception of themselves as writers and artists. During the many decades that academics snubbed the book, while schoolteachers embraced it and critics and diplomats enlisted it in a worldwide ideological war, girls were quietly retreating into the nooks and crannies of their homes to pore over the pages they felt Alcott had written just for them. When they were done reading, many didn’t simply lay the book aside and pick up another; they went back to page one and started all over again. They couldn’t get enough of this novel that illuminated a path to a newly imagined future, one in which they could, like Jo March, spend their hours alone honing their craft and becoming that hallowed, mystical thing: “an author.” In short, Little Women is the book, more than any other, to which American women writers’ ambitions can be traced.
Little Women has been called “the mother of all girls’ books.” It is also, arguably, the most beloved book of American women writers (and near the top for women writers around the globe) and has exerted more influence on women writers as a group than any other single book. So ubiquitous has it been that one writer, Lucinda Rosenfeld, felt compelled to confess, “I must be one of a handful of female novelists in America who, as a child, didn’t devour this American classic . . . and identify with aspiring writer and tomboy Jo March.” A few women writers over the years have outright rejected its influence—Edith Wharton was “exasperated by the laxities [in language] of the great Louisa,” Camille Paglia has called it “a kind of horror story,” and Hilary Mantel hated Jo March “like poison.”12 They have been in the minority, however, and they still clearly read it.
As female readers discovering their ambitions gravitated toward the book, Jo March was the main draw. She has been called by Carolyn Heilbrun “the mother of us all,” and by Elaine Showalter “the dearly cherished sister of us all.” Just as Hemingway claimed that all of American literature (by men) came from Huck Finn, we can also say that much of American women’s literature has come from Little Women. Yet women writers were not simply taken with the novel’s style and language, as male writers apparently were with Huck Finn. Little Women gave them the idea to write in the first place, historically something very few young women have been encouraged to do. More than that, it taught them that their lives mattered and showed them an alternative to the feminine ideal that placed babies far above books. Ultimately, Little Women validated the very idea of a girl developing her own opinions, earning a living, and deciding to become a writer. As Ursula K. Le Guin describes it, Jo March was the original image of women writing, an image that Alcott made accessible to ordinary girls, “close as a sister and common as grass.” “It may not seem much,” she admits, “but I don’t know where else I or many other girls like me, in my generation or my mother’s or my daughter’s, were to find this model, this validation.” As poet Sonja Sanchez has put it, “Jo broke the mold.”13
For poet Gail Mazur and novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who were both born in the late 1930s, the image of Jo in her garret instilled in each of them the desire to one day have a room of their own in which to write. “Jo was the model for my own aspirations,” writes Mazur. Jo’s example led her to request her own attic bedroom when she was fifteen. “It was Jo I was following, alone, snug in her garret, where she could write stories and poems in peace, and no sisters could intrude. Nights, awake with Jo above the slumbering suburban household, I re-read and wept, and wrote fervently in my incoherent journals, and fell asleep in the first room of my own.” For Schwartz, reading and rereading Little Women was not enough; she wanted to “possess [it] even more intimately” and so began “copying it into a notebook. With the first few pages I felt delirious, but the project quickly palled.” Writing the same words she knew so well did not “bring me closer to possession. Only later did I understand that I wanted to have written Little Women, conceived and gestated it and felt its words delivered from my own pen.”14
For many, the identification with Jo was so strong they felt as if she had materialized within them or as if they had inhabited the text with her. “I, personally, am Jo March,” Barbara Kingsolver has written, “and if . . . Alcott had a whole new life to live for the sole pursuit of talking me out of it, she could not.” Maureen Corrigan not only identified with Jo but felt as if their lives had followed the same path, beginning with their “love of books [which] gloriously screwed us both up.” The Ephron sisters Nora and Delia both thought they were Jo. Nora, the oldest, wrote, “[My mother] would tell me how she identified with Jo in Little Women and I would go off and read Little Women and identify with Jo.” Meanwhile, Delia, the second sister, felt she “technically . . . was Jo.” Even though Nora had the ambition, Delia was “a tomboy and a rebel” like Jo.15
The “common as grass” figure of literary Jo also spoke to girls from a wide variety of backgrounds, including African American novelist Ann Petry, who declared, “I felt as though I was part of Jo and she was part of me.” In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, bell hooks writes that she felt “a little less alone in the world” after finding “remnants of myself in Jo, the serious sister, the one who is punished.” Poet Elizabeth Alexander, who claimed to have read the novel 9 million times, found Alcott’s novel “formative to me in thinking about what it meant to be an independent woman who loved your family, but defined yourself away from your family.” Vietnamese American writer Bich Minh Nguyen was similarly “inspired to be like Jo,” and Candy Gourlay, a children’s author from the Philippines who now lives in England, recalls her reading experience of Little Women as purely emotional, “an aligning of my desires with Jo’s. How I wanted to be Jo.” Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick has also described the sensation of discovering who she was, or who she would become, through Jo: “I am Jo in her ‘vortex’; not Jo exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future. I am under an enchantment: Who I truly am must be deferred, waited for and waited for.” She has also expressed the conviction that her identification with Jo was far from unique: “Not so much the male writers, let’s admit it, but every writer who grows up has wanted to be Jo.” Mazur described how she and her friend, “second-generation Jewish daughters of the ‘feminine mystique’ fifties,” both thought they were Jo.16
Judith Martin (also known as Miss Manners) summed up what Little Women meant to many girls in the 1950s: “That’s where I learned that although it’s very nice to have two clean gloves, it’s even more important to have a little ink on your fingers.” While the other March sisters tried so hard to be ladylike, Jo was only trying to be a great writer. “It was the great revelation to women for generations,” Martin has written, “especially in the prefeminist days—that we admire the ladies, the domestic ones, but it’s the woman of spirit, the spunky one, we want to be.” A very different kind of writer, Erica Jong, born four years after Martin, describes Little Women’s powerful image of the woman writer a bit more radically. Little Women “told me women could be writers, intellects—and still have rich personal lives. We need to feel that we are more than our looks, more than our wombs. We yearn to use all our gifts—and this has never been easy for women. The books we treasure, and the books that last, proclaim this: Let us be whole, let us be complete.”17 For Jong and so many others, Jo was both writer and woman, a powerful combination so rarely found on the page.
Women writers who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s continued to find inspiration in Jo, even as Little Women began to lose its dominance in the world of girls’ books. Perri Klass and Stacy Schiff both named their daughters after Jo. Anne Lamott was grateful for Jo’s example—“thank you, God, for Jo,” she writes—because she too wanted to “grow up and tell stories like hers, about girls who kicked butt.” Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame first read Little Women when she was seven, “and it became nearly as real to me as the rest of my life.” She “always identified with Jo,” particularly with her tomboy and bookworm characteristics. Novelist and journalist Deborah Weisgall, who read the novel eighteen times between the ages of nine and twelve, claimed, “I—along with most readers—was Jo, the tomboy with literary ambition. Like me, Jo was a girl of action and ambition in a culture (and a family) that did not encourage those qualities in a daughter.” Peruvian American novelist Natalia Sylvester claims that Little Women “had an immeasurable influence on me. I wanted to be Jo, with her ink-stained hands and big dreams. I wanted to be the rebel storyteller.”18 In Jo these women found a model of ambition for girls that was scarcely visible elsewhere in their lives.
As a measure of their affection, authors Jane Smiley, Anna Quindlen, Susan Cheever, Elaine Showalter, Louise Rennison, and Paula Danziger have all written introductions to the novel. “I can see how profoundly the book influenced me as a writer,” wrote Cheever, who is known primarily as a memoirist. “Without intending to, Louisa May Alcott found a new way to write about the ordinary lives of women, and to tell stories that are usually heard in kitchens or bedrooms.” As a book that celebrated the events in young girls’ lives and made them as interesting as any adventures on the high seas, Little Women made literature accessible and gave girls the idea that their lives were worth writing about. “In many ways it is the precursor of the modern memoir,” Cheever continues. “It is the book that gives voice to people who had traditionally been silent.” For Jane Smiley, Little Women is a book that shows us how to navigate our lives. She calls it “an essential American novel, perhaps the essential American novel for girls,” helping them to shape “their sense of identity, work, friendship, and, eventually, love and marriage.” Anna Quindlen writes more personally, declaring that “Little Women changed my life.” The March sisters were the first characters she had read about who seemed like real people, and more than that, “Little Women offered the first glimpse of a life defined by talent and inclination, not simply marriage.”19 In short, Jo’s ambitions charted a path for many girls who weren’t even aware such a path existed.
Many other influential American women writers—poets, novelists, memoirists, and essayists—have pointed to their intense devotion to Little Women in their youths. Amy Lowell looked up to Jo and wanted only Webster’s dictionary and Little Women with her on a desert island. Mary Gordon received the book from her mother, read it at least fifty times, and then read it again as an adult with her own daughter. Anne Tyler claimed to have “devoured [it] at least a dozen times.” For Gloria Steinem, who read it every year until she was twelve, the Marches became a kind of replacement family during her peripatetic childhood. “It was my ritual and my rescue,” she has said. “Amy, Beth, Meg and Jo—who was probably why I became a writer—were my family and friends.” Sara Paretsky similarly describes Little Women as “the staple of my childhood,” having first read it when she was eight and then revisited it dozens of times thereafter. Amy Bloom learned from Little Women how to think like a writer. When reading it at the age of eight, she first realized “that other people also thought it was interesting to observe other people.” Jo’s daring in donning her writing cap and announcing that “genius burns” also left a lasting impression.20 Patricia Henley got tears in her eyes as she explained what Jo had meant to her. “If Jo could grow up to be a writer, then so could I,” she told me.
I could go on. In the United States there are at least forty other women writers—from Carson McCullers and Maxine Hong Kingston to Susan Sontag and Jhumpa Lahiri—who have referred to Little Women’s influence on them as they were growing up. Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Shaena Lambert have also named Little Women as one of their favorite books, as has Irish Canadian Emma Donoghue. And it’s not just in North America. Many Argentinian women writers have also been influenced by Little Women.21
Although Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice have been more widely influential in Britain, Little Women’s impact on girls there has been profound as well. J. K. Rowling met someone like herself in a book for the first time when she read Little Women. “It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer,” Joanna Rowling has written. Jo March’s bad temper and desire to be a writer represented a “lifeline” for the plain, bookish girl who found relatable heroines in literature “pretty slim pickings.” In How to Build a Girl (2014), Caitlin Moran’s heroine Johanna Morrigan, obviously named after Jo March, is described on the cover as determined to “save her poverty stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer—like Jo in Little Women.” It is no wonder, considering Moran’s claim that “I owe everything I am to Jo March in Little Women and Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.” Young adult author Holly Smale has called Little Women “the book that really cemented my desire to write because I wanted to be just like Jo.” She made her mother buy apples for her to eat while she scribbled on scraps of paper and piled them up to look like a manuscript. Gabrielle Donnelly, who grew up in London in the 1960s, first discovered Little Women when she was nine and felt lost in a rough-and-tumble household full of boys. At night she would retreat to her room to read, and “for the long and glorious hours till bedtime I would become a March sister.” Kate Mosse remembers Little Women as a “defining novel” of her youth. “Like every girl, I wanted to be like Jo,” she writes, “fearless, clever, independent, but capable of loving fiercely and inspiring devotion, a girl who turns down marriage to be a writer. A thoroughly modern miss.”22 Mosse may not have read the second part of the novel, Good Wives in Britain, where Jo marries Professor Bhaer. Indeed, for most girls, it was the Jo of the first part of Little Women who inspired emulation.
And it wasn’t only the novelists, poets, and memoirists who wanted to be like Jo. She inspired women to all kinds of writing careers. British scholar Patricia Pulham suspects that she wouldn’t have become a writer or an academic without Little Women. “When I read about Jo March I found someone I could identify with,” she has written. “I felt it was a kind of freedom I wanted in my own existence. She made me feel writing was the thing for me.” Journalist and novelist Carol Clewlow has called Little Women “one of those . . . handbooks of life, almost, handed down by the hopeful to daughters and nieces, and read by most women, certainly of my fortysomething generation, at one time or another.” Children’s authors of two different eras, Enid Blyton and Jacqueline Wilson, were also heavily influenced by the novel. Blyton fell in love with Little Women because here were “real children.” She thought, “When I grow up I will write books about real children. . . . That’s the kind of book I like best. That’s the kind of book I would know how to write.” Wilson was also struck by the novel’s realism. She has tried to get girls to read Little Women “because those four sisters are so real.” Children’s author Francesca Simon has also said that Jo is the literary heroine she most resembles; she identified with her “passion, her keenness and her sense of not fitting in.” Other British women writers influenced by Little Women include Doris Lessing, A. S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and many others.23
Jo’s power to inspire young women to become writers has also extended even farther abroad. French feminist philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir read it when she was ten and invented games to play in which she claimed the role of Jo. In the words of her biographer, the novel “gave form to her childhood.” Feeling as if she were glimpsing “her future self” (as Ozick had), de Beauvoir “identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual.” Not only that, but Jo helped her, she wrote, “find comfort in myself. . . . I was able to tell myself that I too was like her, and therefore it did not matter if society was cruel, because I too would be superior and find my place.” The girls in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet feel similarly. The young Lila and Lenuù, growing up in 1950s Naples at a time when Little Women was very popular in Italy, are obsessed with the book and dream, like Jo, of writing a novel to escape their life of poverty. But their paths diverge drastically. Lila, despite her early promise, marries and becomes a more traditional woman, like Meg, while Lenuù eventually realizes the dream of becoming a famous author, like Jo. Furthermore, Italian scholar and writer Marisa Bulgheroni, Indian author Neera Kuckreja Sohoni, and Turkish novelist Elif Bilgin Shafak have all been inspired by Jo March. So was New Zealand author Emily Perkins, who named Jo March as the literary figure she most related to when she was younger.24
Nowhere is Little Women’s deep influence more apparent than in the large numbers of novels by women—for children and adults—whose genealogy can be traced to Alcott’s seminal work. Given how many women writers hoped to emulate Jo, it is not surprising that quite a few chose to rewrite or update Little Women, while others simply couldn’t help letting the most influential book of their childhoods seep into the characters and plots they created. Children’s books that owe an obvious debt to Alcott’s pathbreaking portrayal of a spunky young heroine with a literary bent, many of them now classics themselves, include Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Emily of New Moon (1923), Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books (1932–43), Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1963), Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), Eleanor Cameron’s Julia Redfern series (1971–88), J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) with the bookish Hermione, and Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (2005).
There are also over fifty spin-offs, sequels, prequels, updates, and retellings of Little Women. Interestingly, most were produced after 1980, attesting to the novel’s continued influence despite the apparent lower number of readers. Among children’s books, Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Portraits of Little Women series (1997–2001) and Charlotte Emerson’s Little Women Journals series (1998) are direct spin-offs. Judy Moody author Megan McDonald’s middle-grade series The Sisters Club features three sisters, the middle one named Joey. In the second book, Rule of Three (2009), they read Little Women and are inspired by it to cut off their hair. The Mother-Daughter Book Club series, by Heather Vogel Frederick, began in 2007 with a volume focused on Little Women, in which four girls read the novel with their mothers and discover how much they have in common with the March sisters. Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s Little Women and Me (2011) may be the most inventive retelling for children. In the novel, a girl named Emily March has a school assignment to rewrite a classic, for which she chooses Little Women. When she is mysteriously transported to 1860s Concord and becomes one of the March sisters, Emily tries to change the outcome of the story, primarily Amy and Laurie’s marriage, and discovers along the way that Amy is a time-traveler like herself. Another recent series, Candy Harper’s The Strawberry Sisters, begun in 2015, is billed by its publisher as “Little Women meets Jacqueline Wilson.” And although popular children’s author Lois Lowry has never written a spin-off or retelling of Little Women, her books are peppered with references to it.25
Women writing for adults have also been keen to rewrite Little Women, updating it or altering its setting, usually referring to the theme of four sisters (or three—sometimes Beth is left out so that no one has to die) who share qualities similar to those of the March girls. In 1990 Judith Rossner, most known for her novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, published His Little Women about a man’s four daughters, one of whom is a writer named Louisa who has written a novel about them all. Katharine Weber’s The Little Women (2003) also picks up on the theme of one of the sisters, named Jo, writing about her family. Weber’s novel, narrated by Jo and punctuated with commentary by her sisters, depicts the fracturing of the girls’ home as the two younger sisters (Jo and Amy—there is no Beth), still adolescents, reject their parents and move in with older sister (Meg), who is away at Yale and sharing an apartment with a boy named Teddy. Shading at times into parody, the novel provides a contemporary commentary on fractured ideals and the ethics of writing about one’s relatives.
Donnelly’s The Little Women Letters (2011), on the other hand, pays much more homage to the original. Set in contemporary London, this book portrays the great-great-granddaughters of Jo March: Emma, who, like Meg, readily pleases others and is about to get married; Lulu, who, like Jo, doesn’t fit in and is having a hard time growing up; and Sophie, the Amy character, who is an aspiring actress and a favorite with men. When Lulu finds “Grandma Jo’s” letters in the attic, she takes solace from her ancestor’s trials and finds in them a guide for her own life. Although their mother is a product of 1970s feminism and wants her daughters to chart new territory, they are happy to be “falling in love and promising to be together forever,” as their foremothers did.26 However, in Grandma Jo’s final letter, written to an imagined great-great-granddaughter, she advises finding work you can be passionate about.
Some retellings of Little Women are set in Victorian America, among them Joyce Carol Oates’s satirical gothic novel, A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982). This novel draws on both Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and Little Women but reads more like a spoof of popular nineteenth-century thrillers. It features five sisters: a bookish tomboy, a bed-hopping actress, a kidnapped spiritualist, a transsexual, and a wife whose husband’s predilection for asphyxia during sex leads to his death. The book is a disorienting mix of feminine piety, perversion, drug abuse, and murder. Oates is perhaps referencing Alcott’s thrillers more than Little Women, which becomes a source of mockery rather than reverence.
The most successful spin-off from Alcott’s novel, ironically, barely mentions the little women. Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March (2005) envisions Mr. March’s wartime experiences as a Union chaplain and gives him a slew of moral quandaries, including an infatuation with a former slave. He writes letters home to his wife, sending his love to his daughters, and Mrs. March appears near the end at the Washington hospital where he lies ill; but otherwise the book concerns itself with the cruelty and injustices of war and slavery. March’s relationship to Little Women is tangential at best, but perhaps this is what gives Brooks the leeway to tell a compelling story we don’t feel obliged to compare to the original.
A number of foreign language reworkings stick closer to the Little Women story, or something approximating it, but move it to another time and place entirely. Korean Pak Kyongni’s Daughters of Pharmacist Kim (1962) became a film in 1963 and a television series in 2005. Italian Lidia Ravera’s Bagna i fiori e aspettami (“Water the flowers and wait for me,” 1986) was about four Roman sisters named Margherita, Giovanna (Gio), Bettina, and Amelia. Ravera followed it up with a sequel, Se lo dico perdo l’America (“If I say I miss America,” 1988), in which Gio becomes a writer of mystery novels. Popular Spanish-language author Marcela Serrano published Hasta Siempre, Mujercitas (“So long, little women”) in 2004, and it was translated into Finnish, Italian, and Korean, but not English. The novel, set in contemporary Chile, announces the book’s relationship with Little Women by featuring an image of Alcott’s book (called Mujercitas in Spanish) on its cover, and each of its chapters begins with a quote from Little Women. Another Italian writer, Letizia Muratori, also adapted Alcott’s classic in her novel Come se niente fosse (“As if nothing happened,” 2012), about a group of women reading Little Women and a writer whose life appears to mimic Jo’s.
Foreign-set adaptations also include versions written in English, such as Kingsolver’s best-selling novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), set in 1960s Congo. Although she wrote it with Little Women in mind, she admits “the parallels don’t go too far.”27 It is the story of a fanatic American missionary father, his wife, and their four daughters, who each resemble the March girls in cursory ways: the oldest hates housework and is worried about her looks; the twins, who come next, are a tomboy with wanderlust and a girl who is physically damaged; and the youngest, the innocent beloved by all, dies tragically from a snakebite. Kingsolver’s novel most resembles Little Women, however, in its focus on the women in the family. While almost all stories about colonizers have been told from the male point of view (reviewers were fond of pointing out the parallels with The Heart of Darkness), this one is told by the women who are dragged along and try to make a new home in an inhospitable environment. Another novel that imagines the March sisters as part of the colonial project is Jane Nardin’s Little Women in India (2012), written for teens and set in nineteenth-century India. Nardin follows the fortunes of the four English May daughters, whose privileged lives of parties and husband hunting are disrupted by the 1857 uprising that forces them to take refuge in a remote village where they begin to question colonial rule.
English Pakistani author Sarvat Hasin’s This Wide Night (2016) positions the March sisters among the colonized subjects, although after the end of British rule. Published in India and set in 1970s Karachi during the India–Bangladesh War, This Wide Night features the four Malik sisters—Maria, Ayesha, Leila, and Beena. This novel not only moves Alcott’s story to a new time and place but also makes the bold move of altering its point of view. The Wide Night is told entirely in the voice of the girls’ neighbor, Jimmy, thus essentially imagining how Little Women would have been different if told from Laurie’s perspective. No wonder the publisher describes the book on its jacket as “Virgin Suicides meets Little Women in Pakistan.”
Comparing a new novel to Little Women is, in fact, a familiar marketing strategy. Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) has been promoted on its cover as “a kind of Dominican American ‘Little Women.’ ” The book jacket of Kate Saunders’s The Marrying Game (2004) begins, “Like Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women, The Marrying Game opens on Christmas Eve, with four sisters at home worrying about money.” And Saunders herself called her first novel, The Prodigal Father (1987), “a sort of punk Little Women.” Nadiya Hussain’s The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters (2016) is described as “a moving and heart-warming modern British Muslim take on Little Women.” In the case of Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters (2009), one reviewer called this book about three hyper-imaginative sisters who believe that mortals have stolen them from their fairy family “ ‘Little Women’ on mushrooms.”28
Over the years, critics have identified a significant number of women’s novels that appear to nod toward Little Women in various, if less obvious, ways: in the United States, Lucille Fletcher’s The Daughters of Jasper Clay (1958), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995); in Britain, Diane Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters (1953), Fay Weldon’s Big Women (1997), and Sherry Jones’s Four Sisters, All Queens (2010).29 In fact, a number of novels (not to mention television shows from The Golden Girls and The Facts of Life to Sex and the City and Girls) celebrate sisterhood (real or created) by featuring four or sometimes three female friends or sisters with distinct personalities. They are not exactly direct descendants of Alcott’s novel, but there is no denying that Little Women originated the four-sister theme and paved the way for many followers. Besides those already mentioned, we can add Emma Dunham Kelley’s Megda (1891), Sydney Taylor’s All-Of-A-Kind Family (1951), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992), Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993), Ann Brashares’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2001), Eloisa James’s Much Ado About You (2005; includes “A Love Letter to Louisa May Alcott” at the end), Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Sister Swing (2006), Danielle Steel’s Sisters (2007), and Joy Callaway’s The Fifth Avenue Artists Society (2016).
Other works in which the heroines read (and often reread) Little Women include Ellen Glasgow’s The Sheltered Life (1932), Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy (1948), Perri Klass’s Other Women’s Children (1990), and Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). For her story “The Garden Party” (1922), also a portrait of girls growing into women, Katherine Mansfield likely borrowed the names of sisters Jose and Meg and their brother Laurie from Little Women. In Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Foreign Affairs (1984), one of the characters gives herself the surname “March” after her favorite childhood heroine, Jo. In Edwidge Danticat’s Untwine (2015), twin sisters watch the movie versions of Little Women and say the characters’ lines with them. Girls act out their “own version of Little Women, in which Beth didn’t die” in Amy Bloom’s Lucky Us (2014). In A. S. Byatt’s novel The Game (2012), when one of the characters gets her first story published, she comes “running from the post . . . like a character from Little Women, crying, ‘Look, look what I’ve done.’ ” And Jennifer Weiner’s novels also contain many references to Little Women.30
The extent to which Little Women has echoed throughout literary culture should make it a core text in college classrooms, the kind of text students must know if they want to understand the roots of American and women’s literary traditions. Instead, the novel is not taught much at all. When it is taught, it is usually in children’s literature courses. A database of texts in all genres used in college and university courses ranks Little Women at 431 overall.31 For comparison, Walden ranks 31 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 47. Perhaps a more interesting comparison, however, is two women’s texts rediscovered and promoted by feminist critics in the 1970s and ’80s: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) ranks at 50, and Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899) at 55. Both of these are considerably shorter than Little Women—always an attractive feature for college teachers—yet neither has had the cultural or literary impact of Alcott’s novel. However, academics remain uncomfortable with books written for children and, perhaps even more so, books for girls. What educators seem to be missing is that Little Women operates on many levels and deals complexly with cultural prescriptions of femininity. It is not as simple as it may at first appear. As I have found in my own courses, Alcott’s novel sparks discussions and debates not easily resolved. While The Awakening and “The Yellow Wallpaper” had to bide their time until the culture had reached a certain level of feminist consciousness for readers to appreciate them, Little Women has always been read because its contradictions and complexities have allowed us to read it differently over time. It has grown with us, and we with it. But that process has not been easy.