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Shadow of patriarchy ... C Aubrey Smith and Margaret O’Brien in the 1949 film version of Little Women. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive
Shadow of patriarchy ... C Aubrey Smith and Margaret O’Brien in the 1949 film version of Little Women. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

Little Women’s unfortunate brothers

This article is more than 9 years old
Louisa May Alcott’s sequels to the evergreen story of the March sisters, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, lose the original’s vitality and feminist spirit

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, loosely based on her own family, tells the story of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as they grow up looking for adventure, love and their place in the world. The first print run sold out in days and it’s been hailed as a children’s classic ever since. But what about her later books featuring the same sisters?

After Little Women (originally published separately as two volumes, Little Women and Good Wives, in 1868 and 1869) Alcott published two more books, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Little Men is set in the school Jo March establishes with her husband, Professor Bhaer, and follows the lives of the 12 boys they teach. The third and final book, Jo’s Boys, rejoins the school when all the boys have reached adulthood and Jo has now become a successful author. Little Men holds the key to many fans’ lack of interest in Alcott’s subsequent output. For a lot of readers, Little Men was a betrayal of the feminist ideology that made Little Women so popular. Alcott never married, and she knew that readers of Little Women would not be interested in a single, childless, middle-aged woman. She had originally hoped to leave Jo unmarried, happily pursuing her career as a writer, much like her creator, but after the original Little Women ended with the marriage of Meg Alcott was inundated with letters from fans, clamouring for Jo to be married to Laurie.

Alcott noted in her journal her annoyance at these requests from “girls who ask who the little women will marry. As if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life.” But her fans were not the only ones who didn’t like the idea of Jo March the spinster; Alcott’s publisher, Thomas Niles, strongly urged the author to separate her life from her creation’s, and marry Jo off. Fans were also reluctant to accept that Jo was no longer a teenager. According to Alcott’s journals, many readers seemed to think Jo was still 18, rather than in her 30s and by that point (in her creator’s eyes) surely past marriage.

Finally, in an attempt to appease her fans and publisher, Alcott made the Jo March of Little Men a happily married mother to two biological children and 18 adopted children, but denied her a career. While in Little Women the March sisters are independent, by the time Little Men came around they were subservient to the men in their lives – finally the “good wives” of the first book. Little Women placed women at the centre of its narrative; Little Men relegates them to passive observers. At one point in Little Men the adult Laurie brings a young boy to the school and ask Jo and Professor Bhaer to care for him, pompously suggesting to Jo that, “You cure his overtasked body, Fritz [her husband] can help his neglected mind”. Jo March was going to be a writer! She fell in love with her husband while discussing Transcendentalism! No wonder fans of Little Women are frequently taken aback when they read Little Men; we are witnessing Jo March failing to achieve her dreams.

But why did Alcott choose to marginalise the March sisters? The answer lives in her mother’s experiences as a social worker and her father’s theories on education. May Alcott, Alcott’s mother, was the inspiration for Marmee in Little Women. She was one of the first social workers in Boston to be salaried; she was fiercely proactive about helping the poor. Both Alcott’s parents subscribed to the belief that subjugating our own desires is a route to happiness, but the practical turn this philosophy takes in Little Women is redolent of the Alcott matriarch. Little Women belonged to Alcott’s mother, but by the time Alcott came to write Little Men she was running out of lived experience to draw on and so turned to her father, Amos Bronson Alcott.

Bronson (as he preferred to be known) was unable to find work as a teacher and so set up a series of schools with the help of wealthy family and friends. He believed that children and adults were equal, radical thinking for its time, and that their emotional and physical development was just as important as the spiritual. It is often remarked that Little Women is surprisingly lacking in spirituality – the March family never go to church and Meg is married in the garden of the family home. This downplaying of religion is typical of Bronson’s philosophy and it is one of the reasons he was never able to run a successful school. The parents of Massachusetts were alarmed to find Bronson prioritising theological discussion, rather than dogma, with his pupils, and his views were generally considered subversive. John Matteson, in his biography of Louisa and Bronson Alcott (Eden’s Outcasts), writes that “Little Men owes its educational spirit and agenda entirely to Bronson”. Bronson’s philosophy was often at odds with his life; his desire to teach according to his own educational theories warred with the need to feed and clothe his four daughters, and this disjunction between ideal and reality is demonstrated by Little Men. Here Alcott fictionalised the school Bronson always wished to run but could not. Indeed, Alcott was to later describe Little Men as “the childish fiction of the daughter [playing] the grateful part of the herald to the wise and beautiful truths of the father”.

Unfortunately for fans of Little Women, by stepping further away from her own reality and into the intangible dreamworld of her father’s thwarted ambitions Alcott does a disservice to the March sisters. They go from being the independent and self-assured young women of the first book to frightened old women in Little Men. Alcott’s success as a writer lies with her parent’s successes; the lives and loves of the girls in Little Women are familiar to generations of young women, but her attempts at extending this familiarity into Little Men flounder. Paying tribute to her father’s fantasies, and directing her readers away from the unsatisfactorily single fate of the real Jo March, Alcott could never match the power of Little Women.

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