<em>Little Women</em> at 150: Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jennifer Putzi On August 26, 1868, Louisa May Alcott recorded the arrival of the proofs of the first volume of Little Women. "It reads better than expected," she wrote. "Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it" (qtd. in Alcott 413). The book was published in early October, and Alcott fell "into a vortex," like Jo March, beginning immediately upon its sequel, which would appear the following April (211). While Alcott's derision for the very idea of a "girls' book" is well known, there can be no doubt that the novel, first published in one volume in 1880, was an unqualified success (qtd. in Alcott 412). As Anne Boyd Rioux explains in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, the novel has been translated into at least fifty languages and has sold close to ten million copies (Rioux 76, 77). Barbara Sicherman has written in detail about its popularity, citing the novel as an important influence for feminist writers and activists like M. Carey Thomas, Jane Addams, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ann Petry. Other admirers include Ursula K. LeGuin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame.1 Little Women has served as the inspiration for novelists Barbara Kingsolver, Geraldine Brooks, and Sarvat Hasin. It has been adapted for stage, radio, film, and opera, with another film adaptation—this one directed by Greta Gerwig—to be released in December 2019. In 2018, Alcott's classic ranked in the top ten in PBS's Great American Read. (It unjustly finished eighth, after To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, and Gone with the Wind, among others.) Finally, the novel has garnered significant attention in academia from scholars of children's literature, the Civil War, and American women writers, [End Page 87] among other fields. The Louisa May Alcott Society brings these individuals together, offering them "a medium of communication among Alcott scholars and expand[ing] the possibilities for Alcott studies" ("About the Society"). While the success of Little Women can clearly be attributed to Alcott's talent as a writer, its cultural survival owes just as much to the labors of generations of Alcott scholars. In honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the editors of Legacy invited a handful of scholars in the field to reflect on the personal, scholarly, or pedagogical significance of the novel. We asked contributors to focus on a single scene, using it to think about their continued relationship to this book that so many of us have read and reread throughout our lives. We tried to anticipate which scenes would garner the most attention—surely everyone will write about Beth's death, we thought—but we were pleasantly surprised to see such an array of responses to many different scenes in Little Women. And while many of us retain our childhood affection for the March sisters (especially Jo, of course), these pieces demonstrate that we also think in more complicated and critical ways about the issues of gender, race, sentimentality, labor, and charity that are at the heart of Little Women. Appropriately, we begin at the beginning, with Jo's lamentation that "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents" (11). [End Page 88] Jennifer Putzi The College of William and Mary Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press