Is Little Women Worth Reading? Where to Start With the March Sisters

Little Women opens with four sisters complaining about being poor at Christmas while their father is away at a war. There is no meeting across a crowded ballroom, no mysterious neighbour with a fortune, and nobody is in love with anybody. That is the first page, and it is a fair advertisement for the six hundred that follow.

Everything below is quoted from the free Project Gutenberg text with the chapter attached. The same Christmas morning is the opening doorway in the playable Little Women, where you decide what the four of them do with the breakfast they were looking forward to.

🎄 The short answer, and what the book is not

The reputation says a warm story about girls growing up, suitable for children, sentimental in the places where nothing much happens. The first chapter says something else. Jo is lying on the rug grumbling that Christmas will not be Christmas without any presents. Meg is looking down at her old dress and calling it dreadful to be poor. The father is not dead, not away on business, and not coming back soon; he is with the army, and the family has decided it cannot afford gifts this year.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”

That is the whole machine of the book in its first line. Four people want things they cannot have, for a reason nobody in the house can fix, and the story is about what each of them decides to do about it. One remembers when the family had money and wants that life back. One will try to earn her own way out. One will try to paint her way into a class that has money already. One will not try at all, and the book takes her decision as seriously as the other three.

It is worth saying plainly that this is not a book with a hero and a lesson attached. Alcott gives four answers to the same question and declines to rank them, which is the reason readers still argue about which sister was right more than a century and a half after she stopped being able to settle it for them.

💵 What Little Women is actually about

The clearest way into the book is the scene four pages in, where the sisters work out what to do with a dollar each. Nothing in the novel explains its cast faster. Jo wants a book, and the narrator calls her a bookworm in the same breath. Beth has planned to spend hers on new music, and says so with a small sigh that nobody but the hearth brush hears. Amy wants a box of Faber’s drawing pencils, and specifies the brand.

• ✅Megis the one already working. She teaches other people’s children and is open about resenting it: she says she is longing to enjoy herself at home, in what the narrator calls a complaining tone, which is a sharper thing for a book of this period to say about its eldest daughter than it looks now.
• ✅Jo is companion to a rich relative and describes the job as being shut up for hours with a nervous, fussy old lady who keeps her trotting. She is the one with a saleable talent and no way yet to sell it.
• ✅Beth keeps the house running and asks for nothing bigger than sheet music, which is the first hint that the book intends to take an unambitious person seriously.
• ✅Amy is the only one whose wish is a tool rather than a comfort. Pencils are equipment, and she is the sister who thinks hardest about how money actually moves between families.

By the end of that one conversation the book has told you what all four of them want, what each of them is prepared to do for it, and how much cash the household has. The plots that follow are consequences. Everything that happens later in the forty-seven chapters is one of those four wishes meeting the price of itself.

The Christmas Sacrifice is the opening doorway in the playable Little Women: there is one breakfast on the table and a family down the road with none, and you choose whether the March sisters carry it over or eat it. Role-play Little Women →

🐢 Where it drags, and why that is deliberate

An honest recommendation has to name the friction. For the first stretch the sisters are working through a programme of moral self-improvement their mother has set them, complete with a set of symbolic burdens to carry and a promise to be better by spring. Each chapter takes one fault and cures it. A modern reader raised on novels that hide their morals can find this stretch slow, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Two things make it worth pushing through. The first is that the cures do not take. The sister who is cured of vanity in one chapter is vain again forty pages later, and the book knows it. The second is that once the individual plots start — a first paid job, a first published story, a first proposal — the moral scaffolding falls away and does not come back. Alcott wrote the second half at speed, a chapter a day by her own account, and it reads like it in the best sense.

If you want a rule of thumb: give it a hundred pages. By then one sister has sold something she wrote, another has been badly hurt by a family quarrel, and the book has stopped teaching. Readers who bounce off Little Women almost always bounce off it in the opening stretch, before the story has had a chance to show them what it actually does with these four people.

🌲 If you loved Anne of Green Gables

These two get recommended together constantly and they are not the same kind of book. Anne is one girl, an orphan, talking her way into a household that specifically asked for a boy. The engine is a single imagination pressing against a small, strict world, and the pleasure is watching the world give way. Anne changes Avonlea more than Avonlea changes Anne.

Little Women runs the opposite way. The constraint is money rather than temperament, it does not give way, and the four sisters reach four different settlements with it. Nobody talks their way out. One marries into a smaller income than she grew up expecting, one earns badly for years before she earns well, one marries money deliberately, and one never leaves the house at all. The book is interested in the cost of each arrangement rather than in the triumph of any of them.

Read Anne for the voice, which is the best thing in it. Read Little Women for the argument, which is that four people can be raised in one house, taught the same lessons by the same mother, and still disagree completely about what a life is for. The full text is free at Project Gutenberg, and the opening chapter is a fair sample: if the dollar conversation interests you, the rest will.