Little Women follows the lives of the four sisters as they grow from childhood through their teen years into womanhood. The book is based loosely on the lives of author Louisa May Alcott, her three sisters, and their friends and family.  The four sisters each embody aspects of the “All-American girl”. Meg, the eldest at 16, is beautiful and traditional. Jo, age 15, is an impulsive tomboy with a temper and a love of writing. Beth, 13, is timid and frail and is the peacemaker in the group. Amy, the youngest at age 12, is possessed of an artistic temperament and a taste for the better things in life.  The family lives in genteel poverty, owing to their father’s loss of much of his fortune.  In weaving together the stories of the girls’ growth and engagement with the world Alcott created a new kind of literature that combined elements of children’s fiction with others from more mature sentimental novels and showed how women’s lives were built around three main themes: domestic life, endless work, and the nature of love.  It was written at request of her publisher, who asked her to write a book about girls that would have widespread appeal, and was published in two volumes. The first, written in 1868, became an immediate commercial and critical hit and prompted Alcott to quickly write a sequel, which was published in 1869 and titled Good Wives in Great Britain.  The two were combined as a single volume in 1880 as Little Women.  The book has been adapted for film six times and for television six times, most recently by the BBC in 2017, aired by PBS in 2018.

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