“I too would be superior and find my place.” Susan Sontag, in an interview, said she would never have become a writer without the example of Jo March. “I was able to tell myself that I too was like her,” she recalled.

Simone de Beauvoir, as a child, used to make up “Little Women” games that she played with her sister. The book’s fans didn’t merely like it it gave them a life, they said. Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. As this list shows, the influence travels from the highbrow to the middlebrow to the lowbrow. Many others have recorded how much the book meant to them: Nora and Delia Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephenie Meyer. “I read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times,” Cynthia Ozick has written. Unsurprisingly, it has been most popular with women. Since then, “Little Women” has never been out of print. Then, while the publisher rushed to produce more copies of that, he gave Alcott the go-ahead to write a second, concluding part. Its first part, in an initial printing of two thousand copies, sold out in two weeks. Yet “Little Women,” published in 1868-69, was a smash hit. We witness one death, and it is a solemn matter, but otherwise the book is pretty much a business of how the cat had kittens and somebody went skating and fell through the ice. These characters are not glamorous, and the events are mostly not of great moment. Jo catches him spying on them, and befriends him. Next door live a rich old man and his orphaned grandson, Laurie, who, when he is home from his Swiss boarding school, lurks behind the curtains to get a look at what the March sisters are up to. Their mother, whom they call Marmee, is with them, and the girls are always nuzzling up to her chair in order to draw on her bottomless fund of loving counsel. The girls’ father is away from home, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of the family, and cute, so everybody loves her anyway. She collects cast-off dolls-dolls with no arms, dolls with their stuffing coming out-and nurses them in her doll hospital. Next comes Beth, thirteen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and doomed to die young. Jo writes plays that the girls perform, with false mustaches and paper swords, in the parlor. Then comes Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo: bookish and boyish, loud and wild. The eldest is Meg, beautiful, maternal, and mild. It is doubtful whether any novel has been more important to America’s female writers than Louisa May Alcott’s “ Little Women,” the story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the eighteen-sixties.

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