ent less than a hundred" for herself. From then on, she provided the major financial support for her family, while remaining obligated to help them with the heavy housework and nurse them when ill. She never married. Later on, a publisher approached Louisa to do a girls' book, she accepted the offer only because she needed the money. The result was Little Women , one of the bestsellers of all time. Within four years it had sold 82,000 copies. The Marches are an idealized re-creation of her own family, with Bronson kept discreetly offstage: Abba May appears as warm, capable Marmee, who keeps the family together; Louisa as the hot-tempered writer Jo, and her sisters as well-conducted Meg, saintly Beth, and selfish Amy. Through fresh and honest obsevation, Alcott re-creates female adolescent experience that we recognize as authentic even today and makes it interesting and significant. She sucessfully turns into adventures such ordinary events as playacting, humiliations at school, laziness about doing minor housework, and misery resulting from a rather flat nose or tasteless clothes. She exposes the irritations of family life, as when Jo's pretentiously boyish manners clash with Amy's affected elegance, but she affirms its joys and consolations, as the Marches reliably support each other under setbacks from the outside world and make "a jubilee of every little household joy." The girls' moral struggles to overcome small selfish longings and to reconcile self-realization with duty to others are made significant without being inflated. The conflict is most acute for Jo, who must control her passionate temper to fit Marmee's ideal of self-repression and subdue her masculine tastes, talents, and ambitions to fit society's restrictive concept of feminine propriety. Jo's problem is dramatized hilariously in "Calls," where Amy manipulates her into making the formal calls that were required of ninteenth-century ladies and vainly attempts to render...
