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Hi Everyone,

Let’s start the year with a timeless classic for our ❄️ ✨Winter Seasonal Read ❄️✨

Generations of readers have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women.

Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott.The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.

According to literary critic Sarah Elbert, when using the term "little women", Alcott was drawing on its Dickensian meaning; it represented the period in a young woman's life where childhood and elder childhood are "overlapping" with young womanhood. Each of the March sister heroines has a harrowing experience that alerts her and the reader that "childhood innocence" is of the past, and that "the inescapable woman problem" is all that remains.
Other views suggest the title was meant to highlight the unfair social inferiority, especially at that time, of women as compared to men, or alternatively, describe the lives of simple people, "unimportant" in the social sense.

This beloved classic explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

About The Author:

People best know American writer Louisa May Alcott for Little Women (1868), her largely autobiographical novel.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where visits to library of Ralph Waldo Emerson, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now "Wayside") of Nathaniel Hawthorne enlightened her days.

Like Jo March, her character in Little Women, young Louisa, claimed: "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, ... and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences...."

Louisa wrote early with a passion. She and her sisters often acted out her melodramatic stories of her rich imagination for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays, "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens."

At 15 years of age in 1847, the poverty that plagued her family troubled her, who vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"

Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women, seeking employment, Louisa determined "...I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world." Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, Louisa ably found work for many years.

Career of Louisa as an author began with poetry and short stories in popular magazines. In 1854, people published Flower Fables, her first book, at 22 years of age. From her post as a nurse in Washington, District of Columbia, during the Civil War, she wrote home letters that based Hospital Sketches (1863), a milestone along her literary path.

Thomas Niles, a publisher in Boston, asked 35-year-old Louisa in 1867 to write "a book for girls." She wrote Little Women at Orchard House from May to July 1868. Louisa and her sisters came of age in the novel, set in New England during Civil War. From her own individuality, Jo March, the first such American juvenile heroine, acted as a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype that then prevailed in fiction of children.

Louisa published more than thirty books and collections of stories. Only two days after her father predeceased her, she died, and survivors buried her body in Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord.

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