Contemporary Reviews

This item consists of an 1869 review of Little Women published by The Athenaeum, and a review of a biography about Luisa May Alcott from The Independent, which elegantly discusses Alcott’s writing, primarily Little Women. Together the two reviews demonstrate the different ways in which Alcott’s novel was interpreted at the time just after its publication.

In the contemporary review of Little Women, the novel’s themes of feminism and women’s liberation are overlooked, as the reviewer instead focuses on the March sisters’ relationships to men and domesticity. In fact, the novel is even referred to as “a cheerful domestic story.” The reviewer also writes, “It is almost needless to say that Miss Jo is one of the strong-minded race of young women, and that she has started in life with the fallacious idea that a man’s love is by no means essential to a woman’s happiness.” Instead of writing of Jo’s independence, literary and financial success, and ability to support her family, the reviewer only comments on her marriage to Professor Bhaer. Despite all of her other accomplishments throughout the novel, the reviewer points to Jo’s marriage as evidence that women are dependent upon men’s affections. In doing so, the review misses the Alcott sisters’ ideas about women’s strength, abilities, and independence that are present in the novel and highlighted in the illustrations.

On the other hand, The Independent’s review acknowledges Alcott’s “boldness with which she defied the artificial proprieties of the old-time Boston code of culture.” The reviewer writes that in Little Women, as well as in Luisa Alcott’s other works, she demonstrates that, like herself, women can be ambitious, hard-working, independent, successful, intelligent, and determined. Unlike the first review (which discusses women only in relation to men), this one focuses on Luisa Alcott as an empowered woman, and how her empowerment comes through in her writing. The vastly different ways in which Little Women’s attitudes toward women were interpreted in these reviews displays that the role of women in society was unclear during the late nineteenth century when the novel was published. Perhaps the reviews are so diverse because gender norms for women at this time were changing, leaving people with different ideas about how women were or should have been considered.