Little Women (Legend Classics)

Description

Part of the Legend Classics series While their father is away at war, times are tough and the money tight for the four March sisters and their mother. Meanwhile beautiful Meg, tomboy Jo, sweet Beth and precocious Amy also have to struggle with being caught between childhood and adulthood and the difficulties of growing up. Little Women is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's own life and was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869.

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. Educated by her father, the Transcendentalist thinker Bronson Alcott, she was influenced by the prominent men of his circle. Emerson, Hawthorne, Parker and Thoreau. The family was usually short of money, and she worked at various tasks from sewing to writing to help to support it. The Civil War broke out in 1861, and in 1862 she began to work as a volunteer army nurse in a Union Hospital. Out of this came her first book, Hospital Sketches (1863); she went on to write several Gothic romances and thrillers. With the publication of Little Women, her first full-length novel for girls, Alcott leapt from being an obscure, struggling New England writer to becoming the best-selling American author of the century. However, she suffered from ill health aggravated by early deprivation and overwork. Alcott died in Boston in 1888.