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FROM THE PUBLISHER

“Miss Alcott is the novelist of children—the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room.” —Henry James Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War. It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with “woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the “girl’s book” her publisher requested, it 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. Louisa May Alcott based Jo on herself. Consequently Jo is the most fully realized, complex character and, not surprisingly, the one most beloved by Alcott’s readers across generations and most inspirational for these readers’ own fantasies and ambitions. The character shares the author’s November birth month, strong concerns about women’s claims to independence and artistic expression, and the desire to be a writer and to broaden her experience through travel far from her provincial New England home. —from the Introduction by Camille Cauti Camille Cauti wrote her dissertation about the Catholic conversion trend among the 1890s London avant-garde, including such figures as Wilde, Ernest Dowson, John Gray and Michael Field. Her other academic interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century English poetry, in particular John Keats, the Pre-Raphaelites, W. B. Yeats and the connections between them, as well as Irish literature generally. Cauti is a teacher, editor and critic living in New York. Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832. During the Civil War, Alcott moved briefly to Washington, D.C., to work as a Union Army nurse, until a bout with typhoid cut her service short. While convalescing, she reworked her letters to her family into a series called Hospital Sketches; published in 1863, it brought her favorable notice as a writer. With the publication of Little Women (1868), Alcott gained immense fame and achieved long-sought financial security for herself and her family. The sequels Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871) and the feminist-leaning Jo’s Boys (1886) followed. Louisa May Alcott died on March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father.