Little Women has been loved for a century and a half as the warmest of family stories — four sisters growing up in genteel poverty during the American Civil War. But return to it and one figure blazes off the page: Jo March, the tomboy who wants, more than marriage, more than propriety, to be a writer — and who became the patron saint of every girl who ever felt the same.
Jo is one of the most influential characters in American fiction precisely because she wants the wrong thing for a girl of 1868: independence, ambition, a room and an income of her own earned by her pen. She cuts off her hair and sells it; she scribbles in the attic; she refuses the handsome, wealthy boy next door because marrying him would be the end of her freedom. Generations of women writers — from Simone de Beauvoir to J. K. Rowling — have named Jo March as the first person who told them it was possible.
She is the American cousin of Sybylla Melvyn and every heroine who chose the desk over the altar. Louisa May Alcott, who supported her own family by writing and never married, put her whole rebellious heart into Jo.
Read the novel again for her.
Read Little Women — the Erato Press edition →
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