Little Women

The pitch

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March grow up genteel-poor in Civil War New England — putting on plays in the attic, feuding, falling in love, and losing what cannot be kept. It is the great American family novel, and this edition carries Frank T. Merrill’s two hundred original illustrations, the ones Alcott herself approved.

What to know

This is the longest book on our shelf, and the oldest in feel; the March girls speak in a moral register from another century. It belongs to strong middle-school readers and up, and it rewards patience. The first half is episodic comfort, and the second half grows up alongside its characters. Know where the famous sad chapter falls before your reader gets there. A century and a half has not softened it.

Life when written

Alcott wrote in Concord, Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended — a father away at the front, like Mr. March, had been the recent reality of thousands of households. The Alcotts were genteel-poor among famous neighbors (Emerson and Thoreau were family friends), and Louisa herself had served as a Union army nurse. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are her own sisters barely disguised; the March parlor, with its plays and privations, is essentially hers.