Little Women

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869.

Following the lives of the four March sistersMeg, Jo, Beth and Amythe novel details their passage from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success with readers demanding to know more about the characters.

Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls. The novel addressed three major themes: “domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine’s individual identity.” Little Women “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”, but also “as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well”.

Ages 8-12