Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, was published in 1868 and follows the lives, loves, and troubles of the four March sisters growing up during the American Civil War.1 The novel is loosely based on childhood experiences Alcott shared with her own sisters, Anna, May, and Elizabeth, who provided the hearts of the novel’s main characters.2 The March sisters illustrate the difficulties of girls growing up in a world that holds certain expectations of the female sex; the story details the journeys the girls make as they grow to be women in that world. Figures 1 and 2 in the Appendix are of Orchard House, the basis for the March family home, where the Alcotts lived.
Little Women was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869; the books were written rapidly over several months at the request of Alcott’s publisher.3 Although skeptical about her ability to write a book for young girls, Alcott agreed to try. The first volume of the novel was published by Roberts Brothers, and the first printing of 2,000 copies sold out quickly; the company had trouble keeping up with public demand for subsequent printings.4 Alcott delivered the manuscript for the second volume on January 1, 1869, only three months after the publication of part one.5
According to Sarah Elbert, a literary critic, the term “little women” referred to the Dickensian meaning: It represented the period in a young woman’s life where childhood overlapped with young womanhood.6 Other views have suggested that the title was meant to illustrate the inferiority of women, or to describe the lives of people who are “unimportant” in society.7 Alcott created an entirely new form of literature in Little Women; she took elements from Romantic children’s fiction and combined them w...
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...Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Unrivaled Minds. Louisa May Alcott. Nancy Porter Productions, Inc. 2014. http://www.alcottfilm.com/louisa-may-alcott/ (accessed May 10, 2014).
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
Bibliography
Flannery. Classics Retold: The Movie and Television Adaptations of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. 14 September, 2013. http://www.thereadventurer.com/-home/classics-retold-the-movie-and-television-adaptations-of-little-women-by-louisa-may-alcott (accessed May 10, 2014).
Little Women. n.d. n.d., n.d. http://americanliterature.com/author/ louisa-may-alcott/book/little-women/summary (accessed May 10, 2014).
Unrivaled Minds. Louisa May Alcott. Nancy Porter Productions, Inc. 2014. http://www.alcottfilm.com/louisa-may-alcott/ (accessed May 10, 2014).
Wikipedia. Little Women. May 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Women (accessed May 10, 2014).
Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984.
It is significant that the revealed word comes "unsummoned" in a flash of intuition….and yet the implication of the poem is that the revealing of the word must be preceded by the preparatory, conscious, rational effort of probing philology…She [Dickinson] herself was well aware that inspiration, while all-sufficient when present, seldom came even to a great poet.
Wadsworth, S. (2009) ‘Louisa May Alcott and the Rise of the Gender-Specific Series Books’ in Montgomery H and Watson N (eds), Children’s Literature Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan in association with Open University, pp.39-48
Barnstone, Aliki, and Willis Barnstone. A book of women poets. New York: Schocken Books, 1980. Print.
Ferguson, Margaret W., Salter, Mary J., and Stallworthy, Jon. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. fifth ed. N.p.: W.W. Norton, 2005. 2120-2121. 2 Print.
... Now that people of all economic groups were becoming more educated and more importantly literate, society changed. The first great, American, woman authors began to write. Lousia May Alcott wrote Little Women. This was a story attempting to give a realistic and sentimental view on life. This story was, like the works of Twain, relating everyday experiences and romanticizing mundane daily life, making her stories popular to the common person and most importantly, the children of the time.
The roles of women and how they were treated during the 1800’s are portrayed throughout Little Women, while also demonstrating how the main characters deal with these conformity norms. Through the 4 sisters, Alcott depicts different ways they dealt with being a woman during nineteenth-century expectations. While two conform, the other two attempt to rebel against the standards. Alcott doesn’t imply that one way is necessarily better than the other, but she shows that one is more realistic than the other.
“Lucille Clifton.” Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets, 1997-2014. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/79 .
Jo March, the protagonist of Little Women, has a similar childhood to Louisa May Alcott. “Jo is the perfect part for Louisa to play” (Carter). Louisa uses these resemblances as a foundation to show her aspirations as a writer. The family characteristics, the setting of the novel, and the attitudes and desires of both Jo and Louisa are rather parallel. First of all, Louisa lived in Concord, Massachusetts with her parents and three sisters, like her protagonist Jo and her family. She began writing at a young age and wrote in a journal daily. She used this journal to depict her childhood experiences, which she later used to create stories and novels. Several of these adventures from Louisa’s childhood are continued in the novel, Little Women. Because of their supportive families, both women started writing at an early age. “Alcott illustrates Christian virtues, especially unselfishness, fortitude, faith, and charity, in the context of family and friendships” (Morrow). They share a passion for literature and writing, and struggle to help their families overcome poverty.
...ketches. All of these books represent events in her life that were crucial for her writing career. Her life became a success from the popularity of Little Women, which helped her provide for her impoverished family.
At first glance Edna St. Vincent Millay's first recognized poem, Renascence, seems to be easy to understand and follow. However, as this sing-songy poem is dissected, the reader embarks upon a world full of emotion, religion, confusion, pain and sin. This poem is split up into six sections or stanzas which separate the action of the poem into easy to understand parts. I have chosen to discuss the first section of the poem for my close reading.
In what capacity would we be able to tell? All things considered, it 's straightforward: we start with youngsters and adolescents who have dreams for the future, and after that we watch them developed into grown-ups who need to adjust their arrangements to their circumstances. In that sense, Little Women helps us to remember other extraordinary nineteenth-century books in which kids develop into grown-ups, as Jane Eyre and Incredible
Mays, Kelly. "Poems for Further Study." Norton Introduction to Literature. Eleventh Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 2013. 771-772. Print.
According to the Internet Movie Database's exhaustive records, Louisa May Alcott's novel "Little Women" has seen itself recreated in four TV series, four made for TV movies and five feature length movies since 1918. The most recent version appeared in 1994 and features Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Samantha Mathis, Eric Stoltz, Susan Sarandon, and Gabriel Byrne. As a long time fan of the novel, who has happily carted her large leather bound gold-gilded unabridged edition whenever she has moved, I find that I was disappointed in this newest movie version. As a movie lover, however, I found the movie to be an enjoyable experience.
May, Jill P. “Feminism and Children’s Literature: Fitting Little Women into the American Literary Canon.” CEA Critic 56.3 (1994): 19-27. Rpt in Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 146. Detroit: Gale, 2009. n.p. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Mar. 2011.