Speaking Volumes: Here’s why ‘Little Women’ still rings loud and clear, 150 years later

The classic tale of the lives of a mother and her four daughters, persevering in difficult times during the Civil War with the help of neighbors and friends, still resonates today.

Louisa May Alcott began writing stories by age 20 and served as a Union nurse in the Civil War. That experience and her upbringing became inspiration for her wildly popular novel, “Little Women,” published in 1868.

It was the most-read book about women at the time and is still a treasure among American novels, featuring mostly female characters who exhibit the virtues of strength, resilience and individuality.

The narrative of the March women and their neighbors continues to fascinate readers, evidenced by so many books and movies influenced by the novel and its characters. The most recent of these is “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters” by Anne Boyd Rioux, who observes that so much of the story is still relevant today and includes a chapter on stage and screen adaptations.

“Little Women” has been the source of numerous film and television adaptations; the most well-known film version from 1994 stars Susan Sarandon, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Winona Ryder and Christian Bale, and was directed by Gillian Armstrong.

The trend to adapt the book continues, with a new film version just released in 2018 which tells the story from a modern perspective, while a TV mini-series was recently released on BBC.

To learn more about Alcott herself, read the biographies “Louisa May Alcott” by Susan Cheever and “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women” by Harriet Reisen, which explore Alcott’s life in the context of her writings and childhood.

There is even a fictionalized account set prior to the Civil War titled “The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott” by Kelly McNees, which imagines Alcott in a struggle between romance and life as a writer.

In real life, Alcott never married and was not known to have had a love interest (though she may have had a crush on her schoolteacher Henry David Thoreau).

Alcott wrote more than a dozen full-length novels including a follow-up titled “Little Men” about a school for boys run by Jo March and her husband, as well as many short stories.

“Little Women” has continued to inspire novelists like J.K. Rowling, Barbara Kingsolver, Ursula le Guin and Anna Quindlen to feature strong women in their books, largely due to the character Jo March, who was a reader, a writer, and a playwright but above all, a strong and independent young woman.

This dynamic theme of the strength of women, whether in novels or in popular culture, still rings loud and clear, 150 years later.

Speaking Volumes, written by Manatee County Public Library System staff members, is published each Sunday in the Bradenton Herald. Ericka Dow is an information services supervisor at the Downtown Central Library.