Little Women - Background

Background

Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson Alcott approached publisher Thomas Niles about a book he wanted to publish. Their talk soon turned to Louisa. Niles, an admirer of her book Hospital Sketches, suggested she write a book about girls which would have widespread appeal. She was not interested at first and instead asked to have her short stories collected. He pressed her to do the girls' book first. In May 1868, she wrote in her journal: "Niles, partner of Roberts, asked me to write a girl's book. I said I'd try."

She later recalled she did not think she could write a successful book for girls and did not enjoy writing one. "I plod away," she wrote in her diary, "although I don't enjoy this sort of things." By June, she sent the first dozen chapters to Niles and both thought they were dull. Niles's niece Lillie Almy, however, reported that she enjoyed them. The completed manuscript was shown to several girls, who agreed it was "splendid". Alcott wrote, "they are the best critics, so I should definitely be satisfied."

Alcott wrote Little Women “in record time for money.” Since Alcott never married and wrote that she was “often lonely and in ill health,” some people questioned how she was able to write so beautifully and reflectively about "American home life.”

When using the term “little women” Alcott was drawing on Dickensian meaning. Little Women represented the time period in a young woman's life where childhood and elder childhood was "overlapping" young womanhood. Each of the March sister heroines had a harrowing "experience" that alerted her and the reader that "childhood innocence" was of the past and "the inescapable woman problem” was all that remained.