Little Women (1949) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Louisa May Alcott 's autobiographical account of her life with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1860s. With their father fighting in the American Civil War, sisters Jo, Meg...

See full summary » Director: TCM's Opening Night Red Carpet: Jones, O'Hara, Novak, O'Brien 12 April 2014 2:46 PM, -08:00 | FilmExperience a list of 40 titles created 18 Feb 2011 a list of 28 titles created 02 Aug 2011 a list of 24 titles created 27 Feb 2013 a list of 34 titles created 10 May 2015 a list of 38 titles created 3 weeks ago Search for " Little Women " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 1 Oscar. Another 1 nomination. See more awards » Videos Little Women is a "coming of age" drama tracing the lives of four sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. During the American Civil War, the girls father is away serving as a minister to the troops... See full summary » Director: George Cukor The March sisters live and grow in post-Civil War America.

Director: Gillian Armstrong In the year leading up to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the four Smith daughters learn lessons of life and love, even as they prepare for a reluctant move to New York. Director: Vincente Minnelli A jaded former jockey helps a young girl prepare a wild but gifted horse for England's Grand National Sweepstakes. Director: Clarence Brown Little Women (TV Mini-Series 1978) Drama | Family | Romance Louisa May Alcott 's autobiographical account of her life with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1860s. With their father fighting in the American Civil War, sisters Jo, Meg... See full summary » Stars: Meredith Baxter, Susan Dey, Ann Dusenberry Little Women (TV Mini-Series 1970) Drama | Family | Romance Louisa May Alcott 's autobiographical account of her life with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1860s. With their father fighting in the American Civil War, sisters Jo, Meg...

See full summary » Stars: Angela Down, Jo Rowbottom, Janina Faye A girl is sent to live with her uncle on his estate when her parents die. There she discovers much intrigue, family history and secrets and personal baggage. In particular, a screaming child and...a secret garden. Director: Fred M. Wilcox After her destitute family is forced to sell her, a collie named Lassie escapes from her new owner and begins the long trek from Scotland to her Yorkshire home. Director: Fred M. Wilcox The ups and downs of a Norwegian immigrant family, circa 1910. Director: George Stevens Bill's separated from his litter, making friends with the wild creatures until he's found and adopted by young Kathie. An accident separates him from her, and he's drafted into K-9 duty in ... See full summary » Director: Fred M. Wilcox 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7/10 X Based on the characters from the MGM hit of the same name, this TV pilot is about one day in the life of the Smith family. At the turn of the twentieth century, the family is throwing a ...

See full summary » Directors: Alan D. Courtney, Jeffrey Hayden Stars: Shelley Fabares, Celeste Holm, Wesley Addy Edit Storyline Louisa May Alcott 's autobiographical account of her life with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1860s. With their father fighting in the American Civil War, sisters Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth are at home with their mother, a very outspoken women for her time. The story tells of how the sisters grow up, find love and find their place in the world. Written by Rob Hartill THRILLS OF YOUNG LOVE! (original print ad - all caps) Genres: April 1949 (USA) See more » Also Known As: Mono (Western Electric Sound System) Color: Did You Know? Trivia In the scene where Beth ( Margaret O'Brien ) tells Jo ( June Allyson ) that she doesn't mind dying, June Allyson's tears were real. She was so moved by Margaret O'Brien's performance that she was sent home early, still crying, and had to pull over several times on her journey home as her tears rendered her unable to drive.

See more » Goofs Laurie ask Jo how many lumps she wants in her tea and she says three. You can see it's normal sugar and Laurie put four spoons of sugar in the tea. See more » Quotes See more (Spoiler Alert!) » User Reviews This Movie represents one of the finest most beautifully filmed of all of MGM's costum drama's from that era. 13 March 2001 | by zen11 (Philadelphia,Pennsylvania,USA) – See all my reviews The opening scenes of Little Women are so beautifully captured on film that it looks almost like a Currier and Ives post card. It is so magically evocative of a New England in the early 1860's that the viewer is transported to that time visually and emotionally. The characters are so well crafted, warm and human that you truly wish you knew them. The way the movie glides through the season's, from the deep snows of winter, to the bright flowers of spring, through the summer into the golden hues of autumn each season is so wonderfully captured that viewers one hundred years from now will feel that they time tripped to that age so long ago.

With the brutal civil war as the backdrop to the play, the movie tells the sensitive and gentle story of four young sister's on the homefront. Each sister is defined and likeable. Brought to life brilliently by June Allyson, Janet Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret O'Brien. Each actress captured fully the innocents, decency and depth of their roles, imprinting forever the definitive characterizations that would have made Louisa May Alcott proud. I love this most beautiful work of cinematic art so much that I never tire of watching it. It is a treat for the eyes, the heart and the soul and at the end when the camera pans back to view the sky festooned with a glorious rainbow your emotions leap for joy that a movie can so utterly express the simple elegance of human decency and goodness. 35 of 47 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes SparkNotes: Little Women: Character List Character List Plot Overview Analysis of Major Characters Josephine March - The protagonist of the novel, and the second-oldest March sister. Jo, who wants to be a writer, is based on Louisa May Alcott herself, which makes the story semi-autobiographical.

Jo has a temper and a quick tongue, although she works hard to control both. She is a tomboy, and reacts with impatience to the many limitations placed on women and girls. She hates romance in her real life, and wants nothing more than to hold her family together. Meg March - The oldest March sister. Responsible and kind, Meg mothers her younger sisters. She has a small weakness for luxury and leisure, but the greater part of her is gentle, loving, and morally vigorous. Read an in-depth analysis of Laurie Laurence. Marmee - The March girls’ mother. Marmee is the moral role model for her girls. She counsels them through all of their problems and works hard but happily while her husband is at war. Mr. March - The March girls’ father and Marmee’s husband. He serves in the Union army as a chaplain. When he returns home, he continues acting as a minister to a nearby parish. Mr. Brooke - Laurie’s tutor. Mr. Brooke is poor but virtuous. Frederick Bhaer - A respected professor in Germany who becomes an impoverished language instructor in America. Mr. Bhaer lives in New York, where he meets Jo.

He is kind and fatherly. Mr. Laurence - Laurie’s grandfather and the Marches’ next-door neighbor. Mr. Laurence seems gruff, but he is loving and kind. Hannah - The Marches’ loyal servant. Aunt March - A rich widow and one of the March girls’ aunts. Although crotchety and difficult, Aunt March loves her nieces and wants the best for them. Daisy - Meg and Mr. Brooke’s daughter. Daisy is the twin of Demi. Her real name is Margaret. Demi - Meg and Mr. Brooke’s son and Daisy’s twin. Demi’s real name is John Laurence. Mrs. Kirke - The woman who runs the New York boarding house where Jo lives. Kate Vaughn - One of Laurie’s British friends. At first, Kate turns up her nose at the bluntness and poverty of the Marches. She later decides that she likes them, however, showing that she is able to overcome her initial prejudice. Sallie Gardiner - Meg’s rich friend. Sallie represents the good life to Meg, and Meg often covets Sallie’s possessions. Aunt Carrol - One of the March girls’ aunts.

Aunt Carrol is ladylike, and she takes Amy with her to Europe. Florence - Aunt Carrol’s daughter. Florence accompanies her aunt and Amy to Europe. Fred Vaughn - One of the Vaughn siblings. Fred is Laurie’s friend, but he soon develops a romantic interest in Amy. Esther - Aunt March’s servant. Esther is a French Catholic. Annie Moffat - Another wealthy friend of Meg’s. Annie is fashionable and social, and she wears stylish clothing that Meg envies. Ned Moffat - The older brother of Meg’s friend Annie Moffat. Frank Vaughn - One of the Vaughn siblings. Frank is sickly. Grace Vaughn - The youngest sister of the Vaughn family. Grace and Amy become friends on a picnic. Dr. Bangs - A doctor who tends to Beth when she is ailing. The Hummels - A family that lives near the Marches. The Hummels are poor and in bad health.

Little Woman | Humanities Little Woman The devilish, dutiful daughter Louisa May Alcott By John Matteson | HUMANITIES, November/December 2009 | Volume 30, Number 6 A few days before her second birthday, Bronson Alcott traced in his journal the hand of Louisa May and wrote that she “manifests uncommon activity and force of mind at present.” In adulthood, she became “Duty’s Faithful Child.” MS Am 1130.10 (6). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. + Click on image to enlarge. Louisa May Alcott was pleased with Frank Merrill’s illustrations for the 1880 edition of Little Women. She wrote to Thomas Niles, her editor at Roberts Brothers, that the “drawings are all capital.” The frontispiece shows the four sisters with Marmee. Courtesy Nancy Porter Productions, Inc. The greatest American literary sensation of the post-Civil War decade had its origins in a conversation between Thomas Niles, an editor at the publishing house of Roberts Brothers, and Bronson Alcott, the father of a thirty-five-year-old writer whom his wife had named for a favorite sister, Louisa May.

When the elder Alcott and Thomas Niles sat down to talk business in May 1868, Louisa May Alcott had a respectable, if still modest, reputation as a highly prolific and versatile author. Her work had appeared several times in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Her Hospital Sketches, a slightly fictionalized memoir of her work as a Union Army nurse, had been hailed as a work of “uncommon merit,” and her one published novel, Moods, had been reviewed, if somewhat coolly, by the young Henry James. But as Louisa herself knew, she had not risen to her full artistic potential. Now her father, in an effort to drum up some work for her, suggested to Niles that Louisa could write him a book of fairy stories. Niles was not taken with the idea; what he really wanted was a book to fill a yawning gap in the juvenile market—a smart, lively novel for girls. He had approached Louisa herself with the same idea the previous autumn. She had told him she would try, and promptly started the project—and just as promptly set it aside. It was not simply that she disliked the idea, though that was true enough.

Her experience also told her that writing for juveniles “doesn’t pay as well as rubbish.” Still worse, Alcott considered herself wholly unqualified for the task. An irrepressible tomboy in her youth, Louisa had “never liked girls or [known] many” other than her three siblings: her older sister, Anna, and her younger sisters, Lizzie and May. She saw only a faint possibility that the “queer plays and experiences” that the four of them had shared would interest a popular audience. All of her concerns, however, were finally outweighed, as they often were, by Louisa’s desire to help her father. Bronson Alcott, whose capacity for fascinating conversation was so great that people paid to hear him talk, had repeatedly failed to convert his verbal inspirations into writing. Nevertheless, he was now revising a philosophical manuscript called “Tablets,” which was possibly the best work he had ever done. Niles, however, would take Bronson’s book only on one condition. He must have Louisa’s book for girls. That settled it. Louisa flung herself into the project.

She liked the idea of using the name of a month, like her own middle name, as a surname of the family of girls that she would closely base on herself and her sisters. Because she wanted a colder, harsher month, however, the Alcotts became not the Mays, but the Marches. Inspired by her own rough-and-tumble adolescence, she also fancied the idea of a tomboy main character whose given name could be shortened to sound like a boy’s; within her own family, she had been known as “Lu.” Thus Josephine or “Jo” March was born. Writing at the small, semicircular desk that her father had built for her, barely taking time to eat or sleep, Louisa produced 402 manuscript pages in two months and then collapsed from fatigue. Her heart heavy, her head “full of pain from overwork,” Louisa still entertained few hopes for the thick packet she sent off to Niles under the title of “Little Women.” For a woman who liked to observe that everything in her life went “by contraries,” the contrast between Alcott’s expectations regarding Little Women and its phenomenal success was only one in a series of improbable circumstances that influenced both her character and her art.

These circumstances originated largely within her family, for there could have been no father more unusual than Bronson Alcott. In an age when few fathers took primary responsibility for the care of their children, Bronson was so obsessed with the subject of parenthood that he kept exhaustive journals that recorded every event in the early growth and development of his three eldest daughters. Whereas Americans of previous generations tended to see nothing distinctive about the minds of children, Bronson regarded them with outright worship. “Look not into the world,” he wrote, “for the image of the Father. There it is dimmed, disfigured. But look into the radiant face of childhood ere earth hath left its traces upon it, and be blessed—nay, saved!” Believing that children, so recently arrived from the celestial realm, possessed a purity that could redeem humankind, Alcott founded a series of schools dedicated to drawing out the divine essence of his pupils and a potent moral philosophy. Although his schools drew lavish praise from men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a lifelong friend of the Alcott family, Bronson never felt that he could reach the children of other parents soon enough to perfect his theories.

He therefore turned toward his own home, where he hoped to discover the secret of infant perfection in his own daughters and publish his findings to a respectful world. Carefully controlling their environment to exclude all influences they deemed harmful, Bronson and his wife, Abigail, tried to give their children an ideal—if highly scrutinized—upbringing, exhorting them to resist every selfish impulse and to indulge every creative one. On the one hand, youngest daughter, May, was allowed to draw on the walls of her room. On the other, four-year-old Louisa was required to give up the last slice of her birthday cake when an unexpected guest arrived at the party. The NEH-funded documentary Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, to be aired December 28 on PBS, contains a charming scene that nicely encapsulates the atmosphere of the Alcott home. In the scene, Bronson lies with young Louisa on the floor of his study, using his uplifted legs to teach her the letter “V.” When Bronson could relate to his children in a context of learning, he did so with passion and pleasure.

However, his parenting was dominated by theory and perfectionism, and he could deliver painful reproofs when his children did not rise to his lofty expectations. These criticisms, it seems, fell disproportionately on Louisa. Impetuous, high-spirited, and cursed with a sometimes ferocious temper, she resisted her father’s efforts to shape her into a model child. Bronson’s theories could account neither for her violent mood swings nor for the fact that her favorite pastimes included falling out of trees and running away from home. Never guessing that Louisa’s volcanic nature might signify a greater brilliance than his paradigms accounted for, Bronson denounced Louisa in his journals, calling her “unfaithful” and even a “devil.” Louisa tried to parry his critiques with humor, signing early letters to him as “your loving demon.” But Bronson’s faultfinding had deep effects. It took decades before Louisa felt sure of his love in all aspects of life.

The Alcotts’ idealism reached its pinnacle in 1843, when Bronson and an English reformer, Charles Lane, cofounded a utopian community called Fruitlands, whose members swore off all animal products, as well as coffee, tea, and any commodity generated by slavery. The Fruitlands community called itself a “consociate family,” meaning that all its members were entitled to an equal claim on one another’s loyalties and affections. Ill-planned from the start, Fruitlands foundered in less than a year, but not before Bronson and Lane had proposed that the men imitate the Shakers by segregating themselves from the women. Since the only women left at Fruitlands by this time were Abigail and her daughters, the plan essentially meant that Bronson would leave his family. Eleven-year-old Louisa responded with tearful prayers. In her journal, she begged God to keep her family together. The Alcotts did not separate. However, Louisa’s experience of first gaining a larger family and then watching her biological family nearly dissolve left a tremendous impression.

It both convinced her of the importance of family unity as a bulwark against misfortune and opened her mind to the possibility of forming close attachments on some basis other than blood or marriage. Both the centrality of the family and a willingness to redefine family on broadly inclusive terms were to characterize much of her later writing. The signature dissonance of Louisa’s formative years was the contrast between its lush intellectual richness and its grinding material poverty. Alcott expert Joel Myerson has quipped that, during her family’s years in Concord, Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott grew up inside the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Before Louisa reached the age of eight, she had attended school in a room in Emerson’s house. During her teenage years, Emerson gave her free access to his library, from which she borrowed such works as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Under his watchful supervision, she discovered Milton, Schiller, and Carlyle. Emerson’s fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau played his flute for her and took her on nature walks through the Concord woods. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels and tales were regular fare in the Alcott household, took little evident interest in Louisa’s education.

Nevertheless, he was a longtime family acquaintance and, for the last four years of his life, their next-door neighbor. This Concord constellation did much to open Louisa’s eyes to nature, literature, and life. Yet every day spent among Emerson’s books and Thoreau’s woods ended with a trudge back to a home where supper was likely to consist of coarse bread and apples, where the father was habitually out of work, and all were, as Louisa described somewhat later, as “poor as rats.” The august tutelage of Emerson, Thoreau, and her own father made Louisa acutely conscious of the importance of unseen, spiritual realities. At the same time, however, her father’s asceticism, ironically intended to teach the Alcott girls the unimportance of worldly wealth, powerfully persuaded Louisa of the importance of money. By personal observation, she discovered that metaphysical essays and meditations on the Oversoul earned little. Unlike her great triumvirate of mentors, she had no desire to explore nonfiction.

Because of her family’s chronic indebtedness, writing for her was always a matter of “tak[ing] Fate by the throat and shak[ing] a living out of her.” Indeed, her authorial ambitions were so distant from those of her transcendental mentors that, after she published her first successful book, Hospital Sketches, in 1863, she made the surprising claim that she “never had a literary friend to lend a helping hand.” Only once in her important fiction does Louisa engage directly with the philosophical movement that enthralled her father, and the story in which she does so, a fictionalization of the Fruitlands experiment called “Transcendental Wild Oats,” plays its subject primarily for laughs. Literary influence can be terribly difficult to trace. In its sympathy for the plight of working women, its love of playful characterization, and its unerring aim at the most tender sentiments of its readers, Alcott’s fiction seems to owe less to her close acquaintances than to Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—authors with whom her personal connection was either slight or nonexistent.

In her greatest book, Little Women, Alcott’s mother and sisters are all boldly transformed into enduring characters, whereas Mr. March, the novel’s patriarch who shares many traits with Bronson, is barely visible. Nonetheless, Emerson, Thoreau, and the elder Alcott can be found in Louisa’s fiction, if one knows where to look.

Louisa began Moods, her first novel for adults, with an epigraph from Emerson’s essay “Experience”: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” Emerson appears in Moods as Geoffrey Moor, a serene and cordial man to whom “no hint of night or nature [is] without its charm and its significance.” Thoreau also turns up in Moods in the guise of Adam Warwick, a “violently virtuous” soul who “always take[s] the shortest way, no matter how rough it is.” Thoreau also supplies the basis for a main character in Alcott’s other adult novel, Work, as does the lesser-known transcendentalist Theodore Parker, a radical Unitarian minister who helped finance John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and who rallied Louisa out of a nearly suicidal depression when she was twenty-five. Yet of all the Concord and Boston literati, it is Bronson Alcott himself who figures most prominently as an ideological inspiration for his once-wayward daughter.

For at least fifteen years, Louisa intended but never succeeded in writing a novel about her father’s strivings and misfortunes, which she meant to call “The Cost of an Idea.” As it turned out, her best representation of him in her fiction was the “funny match” that she made for Jo March in Little Women: the educational pioneer Professor Bhaer, who, like Bronson “was poor, yet always appeared to be giving something away . . . no longer young,—but as happy-hearted as a boy; plain and odd, —yet his face looked beautiful to many.” In Plumfield, the academy founded by Jo and the Professor at the end of Little Women and that supplies the milieu for Little Men and Jo’s Boys, Alcott deftly combines a pastoral setting reminiscent of Fruitlands with the progressive, morally directed curriculum of her father’s early schools. When asked to write a preface to a book about the short-lived but influential Temple School, which Bronson had founded in Boston when she was a toddler, Louisa wrote: “As many people . . .

inquire if there ever was or could be a school like Plumfield, I am glad to reply by giving them a record of the real school which suggested some of the scenes described in Little Men. . . . Not only is it a duty and a pleasure, but there is a certain fitness in making the childish fiction of the daughter play the grateful part of herald to the wise and beautiful truths of the father.” After books like Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Little Men had banished economic distress from her life forever, Louisa May Alcott could only look back with bemusement on the peculiar path she had followed, to becoming for a time the most popular author in America. “Life,” she told her journal in 1874, “always was a puzzle to me, and gets more mysterious as I go on. I shall find it out by and by and see that it’s all right, if I can only keep brave and patient to the end.” When that end came fourteen years later, it came no less strangely than anything that had gone before.

Bronson, who had long since set aside all his early disapproval of Louisa and had at last embraced her as “Duty’s Faithful Child,” suffered a massive stroke in 1882. He was fading rapidly at the start of March 1888, when Louisa came to see him for the last time. Observing a smile on his face, Louisa asked about its cause. “I am going up,” her father replied. He then added a macabre invitation: “Come with me.” Louisa answered, “I wish I could.” On March 4, Bronson Alcott died. The same day, without having learned of her father’s passing, Louisa lay down for a nap and only briefly regained consciousness. Her doctor diagnosed an apoplexy. Two days later, on the day of her father’s funeral, she did, indeed, “come up.” About the Author John Matteson is Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, which received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Funding Information Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women has received $690,000 in NEH support for planning, scripting, and production. The American Masters film, directed by Nancy Porter and written by Harriet Reisen, airs December 28 on PBS. Professor Matteson is among the cast of scholarly commentators; Elizabeth Marvel portrays Louisa May Alcott in the documentary, and Jane Alexander plays her first biographer, Ednah Cheney. Keywords Family and work for starters, according to a new TV documentary. By Vincent J. Cannato Was the den mother of modernism a fascist? By Barbara Will Andrew Jackson stares down the national bank and wins. By Daniel Feller Even toward the end of her life, the writer revealed a youthful zest for life and art. By Danny Heitman Before writing a single book, Bento de Spinoza was considered a dangerous thinker By Steven Nadler Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Search eText, Read Online, Study, Discuss. Gold And Diamond Stones Available(gold dust)To Potential Buyers Specifications gold block magnet 1. high intensity, various shapes.

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Posted By marafa at Sat 7 Jul 2012, 3:16 PM in Little Women || 0 Replies hi how are you guys Posted By gio at Mon 26 Sep 2011, 11:13 PM in Little Women || 0 Replies Explaining Little Women by Louisa M Alcott Hello All, I enjoy reading classic novels. At the moment I am reading Little Women. I am on Chapter 37, and wondered if someone would be kind enough to explain to me what the sentence; "she covered it with a cloud of fresh illusion" means, about Amy March getting ready for the ball. Thanks. Posted By alexandramorr at Mon 26 Sep 2011, 5:29 PM in Little Women || 1 Reply Reading Little Women Hello everyone, I'm reading Little Women these days. Its such an innocent and sentimental book of all times. Makes me wish for such a sisterly love and innocence in today's world ! Anyway, lets start of with the discussion. Who is your favourite character in the book and why?

Posted By Nazish at Sun 28 Nov 2010, 5:54 AM in Little Women || 5 Replies Who do you think would be cast if there was another adaption of Little Women? Posted By JosephineMarch at Sun 21 Feb 2010, 3:32 AM in Little Women || 1 Reply Jo March VS Idgie Threadgoode I am ashamed to say that, up until now, I've spent so much of my time reading the "new" novels that I've foregone some of the best, most brilliantly written yet. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was on my reading list in my children's literature course. Though I'm not through reading the book as of yet, I get the general gist of it. So far I'm finding Jo March's character reminds me in many ways of Idgie Threadgoode from Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes. This in that they are both from families where social standing and behavior is very important, yet both are little rebels and non-conformists. Now should one analyse the two in depth there may be less similarities, but this was my first general impression of this character.

I had wondered what other people's opinions might be on this. The book is so far one of the best I've ever read. I will have to make sure to pass it on to my children so they are not deprived of such great work, even though they may see it as a "chickie book". What truly impressed me the most was Louisa May Alcott's biography. To think that she only took two and a half months to write this book bewilders me. Her biography is worth reading for anyone interesting. She was a great author, whom I will always hold in the highest regard. She has broken through with many "firsts" in her writing. I can't wait to go home and finish the book. Then off to start on The Secret Garden for next week's class.

Posted By AmaranthL16 at Wed 27 Jan 2010, 8:55 PM in Little Women || 0 Replies Concerning Little Women as a Teaching Tool There has been some discussion and I think very intelligent argument that Little Women was one of the most critical secular tools to teach religious thought in its day, captivating its readers by a wonderful story beautifully told to teach about the necessity of abiding by the concepts taught in the New Testament. Did anyone see this kind of teaching in this book? What did you see? It has also been argued that the book given the girls was not the Bible but Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyon. Thoughts? Arguments to that? Posted By isidro at Tue 6 Oct 2009, 4:54 AM in Little Women || 0 Replies similies and metaphors in the book little women, what do the following simlies mean: dark as egypt prim as a dish please help! I really need to figure out what these mean in the next 5 minutes! even if you only know one, that would still be very helpful!

Posted By eliahm at Wed 18 Mar 2009, 12:06 AM in Little Women || 2 Replies Alcott's characters resemble your own character? Ok. The title is not very clear; I'm aware of that XD And that's why I'l try to explain this new Thread. When I was little and read Little Women, I felt like I had to have a favourite character (in my case, it was Beth), so as to follow her throughout the book... But when I read it again when I was older, I realized I couldn't choose any of the four because - somehow - I felt identified with all the sisters. For example: 'When I'm scared, I act like Jo; but when I'm mad, I usually act like Amy'...

and I was wondering if any of you came up with this idea too :) In case this explanation is not clear enough (english is not my first language as you may have noticed :P), then tell me with whom of the characters you feel most identified with ;) BloomingRose Posted By BloomingRose at Mon 2 Feb 2009, 9:03 PM in Little Women || 8 Replies Civil War influence on Alcotts writing? I was just wondering how the Civil War has influenced Alcotts writing, I know she wrote some a book about her experiences as a Civil War nurse and at the start of Little Women she mentions that their father was a chaplain. I've been reading her other books and there doesn't seem to be any mention about the Civil War or is it just cause it was published after the war? I dont really know. Posted By andd06 at Mon 21 Jul 2008, 7:57 PM in Little Women || 2 Replies SparkNotes: Little Women: Analysis of Major Characters Analysis of Major Characters Themes, Motifs & Symbols Jo March The main character of Little Women, Jo is an outspoken tomboy with a passion for writing.

Her character is based in large part on Louisa May Alcott herself. Jo refuses Laurie’s offer of marriage, despite the fact that everyone assumes they will end up together. In the end, Jo gives up her writing and marries Professor Bhaer, which can be seen either as a domestic triumph or as a professional loss, since Jo loses her headstrong independence. Because she displays good and bad traits in equal measure, Jo is a very unusual character for nineteenth-century didactic fiction. Jo’s bad traits—her rebelliousness, anger, and outspoken ways—do not make her unappealing; rather, they suggest her humanity. Jo is a likely precursor to a whole slew of lovably flawed heroes and heroines of children’s books, among them Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Beth March The third March sister, Beth is very shy and quiet. Like Meg, she always tries to please other people, and like Jo, she is concerned with keeping the family together. Beth struggles with minor faults, such as her resentment for the housework she must do. Beth resembles an old-fashioned heroine like those in the novels of the nineteenth-century English author Charles Dickens.

Beth is a good person, but she is also a shade too angelic to survive in Alcott’s more realistic fictional world. With Beth’s death, Alcott lets an old type of heroine die off. The three surviving March sisters are strong enough to live in the changing real world. Beth is close to Jo; outgoing Jo and quiet Beth both have antisocial tendencies. Neither of them wants to live in the world the way it is, with women forced to conform to social conventions of female behavior. Similarly, it is not surprising that Meg and Amy are particularly close to each other, since generous Meg and selfish Amy both find their places within a gendered world. Amy March The youngest March sister, Amy is an artistic beauty who is good at manipulating other people. Unlike Jo, Amy acts as a perfect lady because it pleases her and those around her. She gets what she wants in the end: popularity, the trip to Europe, and Laurie. Amy serves as a foil—a character whose attitudes or emotions contrast with, and thereby accentuate, those of another character—for Jo, who refuses to submit to the conventions of ladyhood. Both artists struggle to balance society’s expectations with their own natural inclinations.

The more genuine of the two and the more generous, Jo compares favorably to Amy. Both characters, however, are more lovable and real for their flaws. Meg March The oldest March sister, Meg battles her girlish weakness for luxury and money, and ends up marrying a poor man she loves. Meg represents the conventional and good; she is similar to her mother, for whom she was named. Meg sometimes tries to alter who she is in order to please other people, a trait that comes forth when she allows other girls to dress her up like a rich girl at her friend Annie Moffat’s house. She becomes an agreeable housewife, pretending to like politics because her husband does, and forgoing luxury because her husband is poor. Laurie Laurence The Marches’ charming, fun, and intelligent next-door neighbor, Laurie becomes particularly close to Jo but ends up marrying Amy. In between the publication of Part One and Part Two, Alcott received many letters asking her to marry Jo to Laurie. Perhaps to simultaneously please her readers and teach them a lesson, Alcott had Jo get married, but not to Laurie. Laurie struggles with his grandfather’s expectations of him, in a similar manner to the way Jo struggles with becoming a lady.

Laurie is not manly enough for his grandfather because he does not want to enter the business world. Likewise, Jo is not feminine enough for her sisters because she swears, soils her gloves, and speaks her mind at all times. The 100 best novels: No 20 – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9) | Books | The Guardian The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 20 – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9) Louisa May Alcott's highly original tale aimed at a young female market has iconic status in America and never been out of print Monday 3 February 2014 02.04 EST First published on Monday 3 February 2014 02.04 EST Share on Messenger Close Little Women is probably unique in this series: it was conceived, and commissioned, by a publisher. An instant bestseller, and a coming-of-age classic, it continues to appear in polls of Anglo-American reading, and remains among the most widely read novels of all time.

Born in 1832, Louisa Alcott had grown up as the second of four daughters to a well-known Boston educationist with a penchant for reading aloud to his family from The Pilgrim's Progress. As a girl, Louisa was always "scribbling", selling her juvenile efforts to a range of publications aimed at the market for young women. By her mid-30s, Alcott had published books for children, a first novel entitled Moods, and some journalism about her experiences as a nurse in the American civil war (Hospital Sketches). Pseudonymously, she had also written several romances and adventure stories for a variety of "penny-dreadful" publications. At first, when, in 1867, the editor of the Boston publisher Roberts Brothers asked her to write "for girls", Alcott demurred. She wasn't interested, she said; but the idea stuck. Plus, she had some family debts to settle and, as a professional writer, Alcott would have been well aware of the booming market in contemporary fiction for young women.

As early as May 1868, she confided to her journal that although she was now at work on "Little Women" (the title also came from her publisher), she did not "enjoy this sort of thing" because she "never liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting though I doubt it". Rarely has an interim verdict on work-in-progress been so far from the mark. Alcott's use of her sisters' lives is crucial. The structure of Little Women was loosely inspired by The Pilgrim's Progress (No 1 in this series) , but its material is mostly semi-autobiographical, drawn from Alcott's childhood memories. She, unequivocally, is Jo, the fearless girl (and aspiring writer) who longs "to do daring things", and who struggles to escape the Victorian prison of her gender. Jo March and her sisters would become vital role models for many subsequent generations of American woman. Another key to the success of Little Women is Alcott's direct and easy style which is grounded in the reality of everyday life.

The four girls – Jo, Margaret (Meg), Elizabeth (Beth), and Amy – speak and feel like regular young American women of their day. The device of the absent father (away serving as an army chaplain in the civil war), enhances their independence and places this lively quartet at the fulcrum of the narrative. In turn, this is conceived in a wholly original voice that's deeply realistic. For instance – spoiler alert – in the chapter ("The Valley of the Shadow") where Beth dies, Alcott draws, documentary-style, on her own journal of her sister Elizabeth's premature death. Finally, Alcott's use of Bunyan's "quest", together with the romantic elements she weaves into her tale of "little women" (whom we might call "young adults"), ensured that her all-American girls became an immediate hit with the public. Little Women was published in October 1868. By 1 November, in the same year, Alcott was already at work on the sequel. Since then, neither book has ever been out of print. A note on the text The Roberts Brothers edition of Little Women appeared on 1 October 1868 in a print run of some 2,000 copies.

This success continued the following year with the publication of Little Women, Part Two, sometimes called Good Wives. Now the reprints of both titles were averaging about 1,000 copies a month. In 1881, both texts were revised, reillustrated and republished in a single volume. Meanwhile, in England, although Sampson Low was the "official" publisher, he did not have a free market. In the absence of copyright agreements between the US and Britain, there were several competing editions from rival publishing houses (notably Routledge, Warne, Blackie etc). Among UK readers, Little Women has never held quite the same iconic place it occupies in the United States.

Some other Louisa May Alcott titles Little Men (1871); Jo's Boys (1886) The Inspiring Stories Behind 15 Classic Novels | The Huffington Post The Inspiring Stories Behind 15 Classic Novels 09/05/2014 07:14 am ET | Updated Nov 05, 2014 930 Paul Anthony Jones Author, writer, musician According to Jack London, "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club." London himself took the inspiration for The Call of the Wild (1903) from his time spent living in Canada and Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush when high-quality sled dogs -- like those that feature in the book -- were in impossibly high demand.

The stories and inspirations behind fifteen more of literature's most memorable titles are explained here: Anna Karenina (1877), Leo Tolstoy In January 1872, the death of a 35-year-old woman was reported in the Russian press: smartly dressed and carrying a bag containing a change of clothes, the girl had thrown herself under a freight train at Yasenki Station outside Moscow. The woman was identified as Anna Pirogova, a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy's wife and the mistress of his good friend and neighbour, Alexander Bibikov. It soon transpired that Alexander had told Anna that he planned to leave her and marry his son's new governess, and, unable to cope, she had left him a brief note -- "You are my murderer; be happy, if an assassin can be happy" -- and fled. Tolstoy himself attended Anna's post-mortem the following day, and by all accounts the sight of the unrecognisable body of a woman he had known so well stayed with him long afterwards, so that when he came to begin a new novel more than a year later he already had its tragic conclusion in mind.

The Birds (1952), Daphne Du Maurier Dame Daphne Du Maurier is well known for having taken inspiration for some of her most celebrated works from her adopted home county of Cornwall in the far southwest of England. Jamaica Inn (1936) was inspired by an overnight stay at the real-life Jamaica Inn, an isolated 18th century pub on Bodmin Moor, in 1930. Frenchman's Creek (1941) was inspired by Readymoney Cove, where Du Maurier owned a holiday home on the coast. And the imposing Manderley estate in Rebecca (1938) was at least partly based on Menabilly, a grand country house that Du Maurier herself moved into in 1943. It was while at Menabilly that she saw a flock of seagulls following a plow at a nearby farm and was struck by a simple yet unnerving thought -- what would happen if the birds attacked? The resulting story, The Birds, first appeared in Du Maurier's collection The Apple Tree in 1952.

Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller Joseph Heller joined the US Army Air Corps in 1942 at the age of 19, and went on to take part in more than 50 European bombing raids before the end of the Second World War. His military service affected him greatly -- he became an angst-ridden chronic nail-biter, with a habit for screaming in his sleep -- and it took him another eight years to begin dealing with his experiences in writing. After a few dreary post-war years working as a copywriter, one afternoon in 1953 a line simply popped into Heller's head: "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone [he had yet to name Captain Yossarian] fell madly in love with him." Heller wrote the first twenty pages of what he presumed would merely be a short story over the next seven days, but it took him another eight years to complete what would eventually become Catch-22.

Crime & Punishment (1866), Fyodor Dostoyevsky When he began writing it in the early 1860s, Dostoyevsky originally envisioned Crime & Punishment as a novella entitled "The Drunkard", in which he intended to explore the consequences of alcoholism on family life. That was until he discovered the writings of a French writer and murderer named Pierre François Lacenaire, who had been executed in Paris in 1836 for the brutal killing of a young man and his mother. While in prison, Lacenaire had written essays and poems, met with journalists and researchers, given interviews, speeches and press conferences, volunteered for psychological studies, and even offered to have a life mask made of his face, all on an apparent quest to become an icon of social injustice and guarantee his notoriety endured long after his death. It's unclear whether Dostoyevsky had already created the character of Raskolnikov by the time he heard of Lacenaire, but there are a number of striking similarities between his murder of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her half-sister Lizaveta in Crime & Punishment and Lacenaire's own crimes 30 years earlier.

Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley Frankenstein was famously written in response to Lord Byron's suggestion in the summer of 1816 that the guests at his villa on Lake Geneva -- including the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future wife, Mary -- should each write a ghost story to pass the time. After initial reservations, 19-year-old Mary more than rose to the challenge by penning what is now considered masterpiece of gothic horror, inspired by a single terrifying image that popped into her mind as she lay in bed. "When I placed my head on my pillow..." she recalled in the introduction to her novel, "I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision -- the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." The first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously just two years later, followed by a second edition in 1822, a stage version in 1823, and finally a revised third edition in 1831 dedicated to Mary's then late husband, who had died nine years earlier.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Arthur Conan Doyle In July 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle met an English journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson on board a ship returning to England from the Boer War. The pair quickly became friends and the following year Doyle agreed to visit Robinson at his home in Devon, southwest England, with an eye to collaborating on a new novel. Robinson took Doyle up onto Dartmoor, a vast ancient moorland (and now a National Park), and regaled him with an old folktale about a notorious local squire named Richard Cabell who had apparently sold his soul to the Devil -- when he died in 1677, local legend claims a monstrous pack of jet black hounds descended from the moors to escort his soul into Hell.

Although Doyle had agreed to co-author a book with Robinson, after putting pen to paper the story quickly evolved into a new Sherlock Holmes mystery (his first in eight years) and Robinson's input was relegated, in his own words, to "assistant plot producer." Jude The Obscure (1895), Thomas Hardy It is unclear precisely who inspired Thomas Hardy's tale of a young working-class man's struggle to become a scholar, but it seems likely that the eponymous Jude Hawley was at least partly based on Hardy's tragic friend Horace Moule. Born in 1832, Moule earned a place at Oxford University in 1851, but failed to receive his degree. Moving to Cambridge University three years later, it took him another 14 years to finally complete his studies, during which time he battled alcoholism and severe depression until finally, in September 1873, he committed suicide by cutting his own throat as he lay in bed. He was just 41 years old. Little Women (1868-9), Louisa May Alcott The four eponymous March Sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women were all based on the author and her three sisters.

Louisa herself was the strong-willed protagonist Jo; her elder sister Anna was Meg; her youngest sister May was Amy; and her middle sister Elizabeth, who died at the age of 23, was Beth. The setting and the sisters may have been the alike, but the events and circumstances around them were not: the Marches were by no means rich, but the Alcotts lived in near abject poverty for many years during Louisa's childhood. What's more, the March family's father -- a philanthropic and scholarly Civil War hero -- was strikingly different from that of Alcott's own father, Bronson, a pacifist vegan schoolteacher and an early advocate of transcendentalism.

Middlemarch (1872), George Eliot In January 1869, George Eliot wrote a list of tasks in her journal that she wanted to complete in the coming year, one of which was "a novel called Middlemarch." Although Eliot seemed determined to set to work, progress on the new novel was slow and when her son Thornie contracted a fatal case of tuberculosis later that year she ceased writing completely; by the time Thornie died in October, Eliot had produced just three chapters of what would eventually be an 86-chapter work, and she promptly shelved the project. By all accounts Eliot did not recommence writing until more than a year later, when, in November 1870, she began an entirely new work entitled Miss Brooke. This new story introduced an eponymous character named Dorothea, but sometime during Miss Brooke's development Eliot saw the opportunity to merge its narrative with that of the three chapters she had shelved the previous year, and Middlemarch was born.

Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville Herman Melville's own experiences on board a Pacific Ocean whaling ship, the Acushnet, in the early 1840s provided the primary inspiration for his novel Moby-Dick, and later editors and commentators have since even been able to draw parallels between Melville's real-life fellow crewmembers and the characters in his book. The Acushnet was far from his only inspiration, however, as Melville was doubtless also influenced by the true story of a whaling ship named the Essex that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the central Pacific in 1820. Melville later met the son of one of the Essex's eight surviving crewmembers during his time on the Acushnet, and after the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851 met with the ship's captain, George Pollard, whom he later described as "one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met." Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe It is widely believed that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story of real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, but that's by no means guaranteed.

In fact, there are such telling inconsistencies between the two tales -- Selkirk was voluntarily marooned in the Pacific, while Crusoe was shipwrecked in the Caribbean; he was stranded for just four years, compared to Crusoe's 28; and Selkirk was alone, while Crusoe's tale involves encounters with natives, cannibals and pirates -- that some editors have suggested Defoe likely had another story in mind. It may be that Crusoe's tale was based on the 17th century sea captain Robert Knox's 19-year imprisonment on Ceylon, which was published as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), or else on the British doctor Henry Pitman, who escaped from a British penal colony in the Caribbean before being shipwrecked on a nearby island. Alternatively, there could be some truth in Defoe's own claim that Robinson Crusoe was the true story of a man he knew personally, and for whom he simply served as memoirist. Whatever its true inspiration, there's no doubting the success or impact of Defoe's novel, which ran to four editions in its first year alone and has remained enduringly popular ever since.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson had already written a play about Deacon Brodie -- an 18th century Edinburgh city councillor who led a double life as a burglar -- when in 1885 he had a dream about a mild-mannered man transforming into a monster. His wife Fanny later recalled how, "In the small hours of one morning... I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily, 'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey-tale.'" She had woken him, she later discovered, at what would eventually become Jekyll's first transformation into Mr Hyde. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), John Buchan John Buchan was recovering from a stomach ulcer at a nursing home in Broadstairs on the far southeast coast of England he began work on what he referred to as his first "shocker" in 1914.

Buchan reportedly took the title of the novel from a wooden staircase that once ran from the clifftops at Broadstairs down to the beach, although there are several conflicting accounts: one version of the story has Buchan's young daughter running down the stairs two at a time and announcing that there were "39 steps" down to the beach, while another claims that as there were actually 78 steps Buchan either halved the number simply to make a snappier title, or else changed it because he was 39 years old at the time. Three Men In A Boat (1889), Jerome K. Jerome In the mid 1880s, Jerome K Jerome came up with the idea of writing a straightforward travel guide to the River Thames, including descriptions of several historical sites along its course. As he began to compile it, however, Jerome's guide became increasingly filled with humorous anecdotes and bantering conversations recalled from boat trips he had taken along the river from London to Oxford with two of his friends, George Wingrave and Carl Henschel.

Together, the three men became the eponymous Three Men In A Boat, with the addition of Montmorency the dog having, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog", according to Oxford World's Classics. To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee Harper Lee has long denied claims that To Kill A Mockingbird is an autobiographical work, but rather a reflection of an author simply writing about what he or she knows and has experienced first hand. Either way, it's hard not to see parallels between her Pulitzer Prize-winning classic and her childhood growing up in Monroeville, Alabama. Just like Scout, Lee's father practiced as a lawyer, and in 1919 was faced with defending two black men accused of the murder of a local white shopkeeper (both men - a father and son - were later hanged). Moreover, Lee, like Scout, was a tomboy in her youth, and her eldest brother Edwin, like Jem, was four years her senior. She wrote the book in the years following the death of her mother in 1951, and in the story Scout too has lost her mother.

And even the character of Dill, who lives next door to the Finch family during the summer, is modelled on her childhood friend Truman Capote, who would spend the summer with his aunt in Alabama while his mother visited New York. Follow Paul Anthony Jones on Twitter: This Blogger's Books and Other Items from...

Question: What is the surname of the four sisters in ‘Little Women’ (1868-9)?
Answer: MARCH