Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel, credited with starting the new genre of young adult fiction. When Alcott (1832-88) wrote Little Women, she only did so as her publisher refused to publish her father's book otherwise and as she hoped it would make money. It made Alcott's fortune. This coming of age story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, each overcoming their own moral flaws, has delighted generations of readers and was so popular from the start that Alcott wrote the second part in 1869 and further sequels and spin-offs in the coming years. Her work has inspired countless directors, composers and authors to make many reimagined versions ever since, with the sisters played by film actors such as Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson.

With

Bridget Bennett
Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

Erin Forbes
Senior Lecturer in African American and U.S. Literature at the University of Bristol

And

Tom Wright
Reader in Rhetoric and Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Louisa May Alcott (ed. Madeline B Stern), Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (William Morrow & Co, 1997)

Kate Block, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado and Jane Smiley, March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women (Library of America, 2019)

Anne Boyd Rioux, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)

Azelina Flint, The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti (Routledge, 2021)

Robert Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007)

Bethany C. Morrow, So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix (St Martin’s Press, 2021)

Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein (eds.), Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott (Grey House Publishing Inc, 2016)

Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (Picador, 2010)

Daniel Shealy (ed.), Little Women at 150 (University of Mississippi Press, 2022)

Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Virago, 2009)

Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson (eds.), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave, 2016), especially “The ‘Willful’ Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls” by Hilary Emmett

Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography (first published 1950; Northeastern University Press, 1999)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production