The Newness of Little Women

The first readers and reviewers of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women recognized it as something new. As the reviewer for Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine exulted in December 1868, “This book is most originally written. It never gets commonplace or wearisome, though it deals with the most ordinary everyday life” (qtd. in Alcott 548). Even its critics – who disliked its use of slang, its mildly heterodox theology, its ungrammatical American girls who whistled or ached for pickled limes or let the pet bird starve or rejected rich, handsome, simpatico young men (for reasons rarely explored in previous girls’ books) – acknowledged there was something different about the book, its heroines, and author. As the reviewer for The Spectator noted, “The writer’s strength is principally given to the portraiture of Jo, alias Josephine, a boy, we may call her, who by some misadventure finds himself or herself in the shape of a girl. She is, indeed, a person to be remembered” (qtd. in Alcott 549).

When it initially appeared 150 years, part one in September 1868 and part two in April 1869, Little Women broke new ground, slapped together a house, and commenced welcoming hordes of visitors. Fresh, lively, and distinctly American, the novel offered singular depictions of young women and men playing, talking, squabbling, dreaming, creating, learning, and coming of age in ways that embodied and resisted its era and region and immediately generated passionate responses. As one-time Concord resident and writer Frank Preston Stearns later reported:

First the young people read it; then their fathers and mothers; and then the grandparents read it. Grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way down town in the morning said to each other, “Have you read ‘Little Women’”; and laughed as they said it. The clerks in my office read it, so also did the civil engineer, and the boy in the elevator. It was the rage in ‘69. (81–82)

While everyone seemed to be reading Little Women in 1869, the novel enjoys no such ubiquity in 2019. As Anne Boyd Rioux reminds us in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (2018), boys rarely read the novel now, and schoolteachers rarely assign it. In his review of Rioux’s book for this issue, Pulitzer-Prize winning Alcott biographer John Matteson summarizes Rioux’s analysis of the modern containment of the novel:

Rioux laments the virtual disappearance of Little Women from American classrooms and the widespread presumption that the novel is incapable of appealing to boy readers. As Rioux observes, boys in this country are already given too few incentives and occasions for understanding the inner lives of girls. Removing Little Women from public discourse contributes all the more to male ignorance about feminine experience. (see p. 459)

On the other hand, although it is only rarely included today in high school or middle school curricula, Little Women has made its way into higher education, in anthologies and on syllabi and as a legitimate object for scholarly investigation, which was not exactly the case 50 years ago. Moreover, as the many recent adaptations and reissues and retellings of Little Women suggest, the novel remains a significant literary and popular culture phenomenon. As Marlowe Daly-Galeano wisely notes, “the traits that allow a literary text to attain popularity in a particular moment are not the same ones that help a novel maintain popularity over time” (393). No longer quite a rage or fad, Little Women is nonetheless enduring.

This special issue of Women’s Studies is devoted to what made Alcott’s novel new in its original moment and what continues to make it new. Daniel Shealy argues that in Little Women, in contrast with other nineteenth-century American blockbuster novels, Alcott “gave serious thought to the marriages … and set out to instruct her readers, especially young women, on the importance of egalitarian relationships between husbands and wives” (366). Likewise, Sarah Wadsworth addresses the originality of Alcott’s depictions of heterosexual friendships.

Examining the ways Little Women seems to becomes new over and over again, several of our contributors, including Kristina West and Azelina Flint, address the host of print and film adaptations that have appeared over the last decade or so. Studying the 2010 horror mash-ups Little Vampire Women and Little Women and Werewolves, Daly-Galeano argues that such fads help us to “conceptualize the enduring newness of Alcott’s 1868–1869 Little Women, a groundbreaking novel in its day and one that continues to speak to readers” (393). Elise Hooper addresses recent print adaptations, and she and reviewer Lauren Rizzuto also offer analyses of recent film adaptations, including Vanessa Caswill’s 2017 BBC miniseries and Clare Niederpruem’s 2018 feature film. Beverly Lyon Clark, whose masterful The Afterlife of Little Women offered the most comprehensive assessment of the novel’s scholarly and popular reception from initial publication until 2014, contributes a welcome perspective on the plethora of adaptations of Little Women that have appeared over the last five years, from Jennifer Adams and Alison Oliver’s BabyLit board book and Rey Terciero and Bre Indigo’s graphic novel to adult reworkings of Alcott’s characters and plot in such texts as Sarvat Hasin’s This Wide Night and Anna Todd’s The Spring Girls. As Clark perceptively notes, these reworkings and adaptations “are acts of homage, but they also rework the premises of their predecessor, providing a window onto a given reader’s reading, sometimes talking back to Alcott’s novel, sometimes resituating it in the national or international imagination” (436). Our final essay for this issue is a fugue of expert testimonies by Angela Hubler, Laura Dassow Walls, and Melissa McFarland Pennell on interdisciplinary approaches to teaching Little Women, including rationales, contexts, and pedagogical strategies. We hope that the contributors’ expert analyses will provide readers with new and lasting insights about Alcott’s landmark novel and its capacity and proclivity to endure.

In October 1868, Alcott wrote in her journal, following initial responses to the publication of Little Women, “much interest in my little women, who seem to find friends by their truth to life, as I hoped” (qtd. in Alcott 414). Among the friends who have nurtured this issue of Women’s Studies are editor Wendy Martin, who invited us to transform a 2018 American Literature Association panel into a special issue for this journal, and Managing Editor Lauren Morrison, who provided support at every turn. We celebrate our essayists and reviewers, with heartfelt appreciation for their expertise, dedication, and enthusiasm. Scholars Elise Barker, Christine Doyle, Kristen Proehl, Anne Boyd Rioux, Lauren Rizzuto, and Roberta Seelinger Trites offered suggestions integral to the volume’s development. At Kansas State University, Karin Westman and our colleagues in the Department of English offered enthusiasm and support for our work, while Tommy Theis from Photo Services assisted in the preparation of our cover image, an illustration by Frank Merrill for the 1880 edition of Little Women.