Alcott, Louisa May - Little Women

Little Women’s general plot

The main characters of the novel are four sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. They are quite different: the first one is Meg, who is the most mature of the sisters, while Jo is quite tomboy and she wants to become a writer, Amy is frivolous and Beth is very sensitive and she loves music. Their father is away, because he’s a soldier during the Civil War. The story is set in Massachussets during the winter. They are poor, but her aunt is very rich.
On Christmas Eve the sisters desire to buy a gift for their mother: slippers, gloves, a parfum and handkerchief. Mister Laurence is a rich old man, who lives next door and who helps them. At New Years Eve he invites them at his party. At the party Jo knows Laurence, who is the nephew of Mister Laurence. In the following weeks, the sisters often go to Mister Laurence’s, where Beth plays the piano. During the spring they have become friends, also with Mr Brooke, who is the Laurence’s teacher and he is in love with Meg. At the end of the summer, Jo’s novel is published. On a November Day they receive a telegram, where they find out that their father was ill, so Mr March has to go to Washington, with Mr Brooke. In order to help her, Jo has her hair cut and sell it. Beth is also ill, because she helped a poor family, whose children were ill. Because Beth’s condition is worsening, they call their mother. Then, Beth and her father recovers and on Christmas Eve come back. Mr Brooke asks Meg to marry him, but the aunt says that he’s not rich enough. Meg doesn’t care because she is in love with him. These year was very difficult but now they have become very brave little women.

Little Women’s analysis from an historical point of view

Massachusetts it’s a small state on the North-East Coast of the United States in New England, whose capital city is Boston, an important seaport and manufacturing centre. In Massachusetts there are Harvard University and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Massachusetts was a Pilgrim’s colony, founded in the seventeenth century. In 1773, Boston was the town where the American Revolution started. The American rebels were led by George Washington, who became the first President after the American victory over the English Army in 1783.
The story of the March sisters is set in the period of the war between the Northern and the Southern States of the USA (1861-1865). At that time, there were more than one million black people who were slaves. The Northern States had abolished slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while the Southern States had gone on using slaves to grow cotton, tobacco and sugar in the large plantations. When Abraham Lincoln, the leader of the anti-slavery movement, was elected President eleven of the southern states proclaimed themselves independent as the Confederate States of America. The Northern States refused to recognize the secession and the war broke out. The war ended with the defeat of the Confederate States and slavery was abolished.