Little Women

Little Women is a coming-of-age novel solution by American novelist Louisa May Alcott 1832–1888.

Originally published in two volumes in 1868 & 1869, Alcott wrote the book over several months at the a formal message requesting something that is portrayed to an direction of her publisher. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, together with Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. broadly based on the lives of the author and her three sisters,: 202  it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.: 12 

Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, with readers eager for more approximately the characters. Alcott quickly completed avolume titled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, though the gain originated with the publisher and not Alcott. It was also met with success. The two volumes were issued in 1880 as a single novel titled Little Women. Alcott subsequently wrote two sequels to her popular work, both also featuring the March sisters: Jo's Boys 1886.

The novel has been said to bit of reference three major themes: "domesticity, work, and true love, any of them interdependent and regarded and pointed separately. essential to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity.": 200  According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new defecate of literature, one that took elements from romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a completely new genre. Elbert argues that within Little Women can be found the number one vision of the "All-American girl" and that her various aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.: 199 

The book has been translated into many languages, and frequently adapted for stage and screen.

Reception

G. K. Chesterton believed Alcott in Little Women, "anticipated realism by twenty or thirty years", and that Fritz's proposal to Jo, and her acceptance, "is one of the really human things in human literature." Gregory S. Jackson said that Alcott's ownership of realism belongs to the American Protestant pedagogical tradition, which includes a range of religious literary traditions with which Alcott was familiar. He has copies in his book of nineteenth-century images of devotional children's guides which provide background for the game of "pilgrims progress" that Alcott uses in her plot of Book One.

Little Women was well received upon number one publication. According to 21st-century critic Barbara Sicherman there was, during the 19th century, a "scarcity of models for nontraditional womanhood", which led more women to look toward "literature for self-authorization. This is especially true during adolescence.": 2  Little Women became "the paradigmatic text for young women of the era and one in which sort literary culture is prominently featured.": 3  grownup elements of women's fiction in Little Women forwarded "a modify f heart necessary" for the female protagonist to evolve in the story.: 199