Little Women

The test is subtractive, and it is hard on the book. The spine is required: the father’s absence, the telegram, Jo’s hair, Beth’s fever, the father’s return. But the first part is a sequence of moral episodes, each closed by a counsel, and several could go without loss to what the book knows: “Experiments”, a parable guessed on its first page; “Camp Laurence” and its English visitors; “Castles in the Air”; much of the sisters’ club and its paper. The second part, written to order after the first had sold, is permitted more than compelled: “Calls”, “Artistic Attempts”, the European letters and the long courtship of Amy and Laurie. It earns one necessity: Jo’s refusal of Laurie and Beth’s death, which turn a family idyll toward its real subject. Perhaps a quarter of the whole is assembled rather than required, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.

Score: 7.0 / 10

What the book brings into the open, and holds, is the economy of a genteel poor household of women: the sisters working for wages, Meg as a governess and Jo as companion to Aunt March; the Christmas dollar spent on their mother; Jo’s hair sold for twenty-five dollars; Jo writing sensation stories for money and burning them under Bhaer’s judgment. Its deeper disclosure is a contradiction it does not resolve. The book preaches self-government, and its mother confesses, “I am angry nearly every day of my life”; yet it makes the girl who will not govern herself its living centre, and lets her refuse the rich boy. Anger as a woman’s daily discipline is articulated, not a mood, and it holds. Held below the bar because the book closes what it opens, by design: the moral is stated after each lesson, and Jo’s vocation is folded into a school and a marriage before its cost is counted.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Warm rather than elevated, and the book seldom aims higher. Its heights are few. Jo’s cropped head in “A Telegram”, and her crying in the dark afterwards. The night in “Dark Days” when Jo and Laurie wait for the turn of Beth’s fever. Beth at the piano that Mr. Laurence gives her, a small true height. Above all “The Valley of the Shadow”, where Beth’s death is made quiet and inevitable, without a deathbed speech of the Little Nell kind, though the chapter reaches for the sentimental pieties of its period. Against these the long middle of each part runs at the level of the comic sketch and the household lesson. Height is real twice or three times, and seldom: that is what holds the axis level with the lowest. The book’s force is affection and recognition, which this axis does not measure.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Here the book builds. The first part is constructed on The Pilgrim’s Progress, not merely allusive to it: each sister takes up a burden in the first chapter, and the chapters walk the stations. Apollyon is Jo’s temper, met in the burnt manuscript and the ice; Vanity Fair is Meg’s week at the Moffats’; the Palace Beautiful is Beth’s welcome into the Laurence house; the Valley of Humiliation is Amy’s limes. The four sisters carry the old pattern of four temperaments and four ways of a woman’s life, the wife, the artist who settles, the writer who will not, the saint who dies, and in the second part each ending is the meaning of its type. The book then made its own archetype: Jo March, the tomboy who writes, a figure readers and writers have lived by. Held below the bar because the frame thins once the first part ends, and Beth’s archetype is the period’s angel in the house, received rather than remade.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is the moral domestic tale and the Sunday-school story: Bunyan as the frame, the American domestic novel, and Dickens as a household presence, in the sisters’ Pickwick Club. The departure is real, and it was noticed: girls who quarrel, use slang and want things; a heroine who whistles, burns her dress at a party and refuses the handsome rich neighbour whom every reader wanted her to marry, and marries instead a poor, older, foreign professor, a turn made against the book’s own readers. The cost was bounded. The form is the proven episodic family chronicle, the moral frame is kept, the publisher asked for exactly this book, and Jo’s departure is at last domesticated. A swerve within the genre, with a stake taken on one ending.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The form is the chronicle of a household in short chapters, each a scene and a lesson, and its main formal idea is the two-part shape: one year of girlhood, then the years of marriage and death. In the first part the sisters are seen as a single body; in the second they are separated one by one, so that the form enacts what the book knows about the end of childhood. The pilgrim frame gives the first part an instrument, the domestic made into a journey. But much of the form is a container. The chapters could be reordered within each part with little loss; the narrator’s address to her young readers is a convention; the second part’s letters, journal and European chapters are devices of convenience. Made a single continuous novel, the book would lose its episodic warmth and little of its knowledge, and that holds the axis below the general level.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The evidence of yield is substantial. A century and a half of reading has divided over the same questions without exhausting them: whether the book is a conduct manual or a record of resistance to one; whether Bhaer is Jo’s defeat or her real choice; what Beth’s death means; what Amy, the sister readers dislike, is allowed to win. Feminist criticism from the 1970s reopened it, and the discovery of Alcott’s own anonymous sensation thrillers gave Jo’s burned stories a second meaning. Each adaptation has had to decide the ending again, which is evidence that the ending is a question. Held here because the yield is concentrated in a few places, Jo’s vocation, the refusal of Laurie and the close, and much of the text is spent on a first reading: the lessons say what they mean.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The field is American prose fiction of the 1860s, with the literature for and about girls in English within it. The intrinsic force is moderate. The book did not reorganise the novel’s means; it took the domestic tale and made its girls particular, comic and wanting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is very large and particular. The book founded the family chronicle of sisters as a lasting form for young readers, and its own sequels made the school novel of Plumfield. Jo became a named model for women who wrote: Simone de Beauvoir, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, records finding herself in Jo, and in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend two girls buy the book and resolve to write. Reach outweighs force; the force does not reach the bar, and the field it moved is narrower than the novel at large.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, has never been out of print and has been read without a break since 1868; it is widely translated and taught, and it has been adapted again and again: films of 1933, 1949, 1994 and 2019, and versions for the stage, for opera and in Japanese animation. Its presence is among the widest of any American novel of its century, though fame and adaptation add little to survival on the text alone. One thing holds the axis from the top of its span: a surface fixed to its moment in one respect, the didactic narration and the period’s piety about self-denial, which later readers have had to read around. The scenes and the sisters have outlived those conditions.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Alcott’s English, with no translation between. The making is in the dialogue and the comedy: quick, colloquial, individuated voices, so that each sister can be known by a line, from the first sentence, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. The household scenes are managed with economy, and the large scenes, the telegram, the hair, the refusal, the death, are placed with sure timing. Against this stand the narrator’s moralising address, the set-piece lessons, “Experiments” and much of the mother’s counsel, sentimental diction in the Beth chapters, and the visible haste of a book written fast to commission: the European chapters thinly made, Bhaer sketched rather than made. The prose is serviceable rather than load-bearing; it does not carry meaning sentence by sentence.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the pantomime of the sisters’ club and its paper, and Beth’s death. One law governs them, from “Playing Pilgrims” to “Harvest Time”: the moral realism of a household in which every act is a small test and every test has a meaning, with comedy and grief under the same rule. The Moffats’ ball obeys it, and so does the Hummels’ cottage where Beth catches the fever. The strain shows in two places: the European chapters, where the book borrows the travel letter and the society novel and the household law loosens; and the ending with Bhaer, which the book’s own logic, Jo’s resistance, half refuses and its moral law, the good plain man, requires, a seam readers have felt since 1869. The range is narrow, one house, one town, one class and its neighbours, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Held in one structure: consciousness, Jo’s above all; the family as a body that ages and breaks; women’s labour, paid and unpaid; money and class, in the Marches, the Laurences, the Moffats, the Hummels and Aunt March’s estate; vocation in art and in writing; marriage in three kinds; death; and a Protestant religion of conduct made into a journey by Bunyan. These are integrated well where they are present. The state and history are offstage: the Civil War is the father’s absence, a telegram and a hospital in Washington, never a field of the book, and the town is a backdrop. Nature appears as season and garden. Its orders are domestic, and what is weighed is what the book holds: the household and what presses on it.

Score: 7.4 / 10