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Other titles in the Bantam Classics series:

  1. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  2. A Midsummer Night's Dream
  3. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
  4. Antony and Cleopatra
  5. Around the World in Eighty Days
  6. As You Like It
  7. Bleak House
  8. Candide
  9. Cyrano de Bergerac
  10. Cyrano de Bergerac: An Heroic Comedy in Five Acts
  11. David Copperfield
  12. Deerslayer
  13. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
  14. Dracula
  15. Early African-American Classics
  16. Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night
  17. Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen
  18. Four Tragedies
  19. Great Expectations
  20. Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings
  21. Hard Times
  22. Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer
  23. Henry V
  24. Henry VI: Parts I, II, and III
  25. Inferno: The Divine Comedy
  26. Jane Eyre
  27. Jude the Obscure
  28. Julius Caesar
  29. Kidnapped
  30. Kim
  31. King John and Henry VIII
  32. King Lear (88 Edition)
  33. Late Romances : Cymbeline, Pericles, the Winter's Tale and the Tempest (88 Edition)
  34. Leaves of Grass
  35. Life on the Mississippi (45 Edition)
  36. Lord Jim
  37. Macbeth
  38. Madame Bovary
  39. Main Street
  40. Much Ado about Nothing
  41. My Antonia
  42. O Pioneers
  43. O Pioneers!
  44. Oliver Twist
  45. On Liberty and Utilitarianism
  46. Otherness
  47. Phantom of the Opera (Bantam Classic)
  48. Pudd'nhead Wilson
  49. Pygmalion and Major Barbara
  50. Richard II
  51. Richard III
  52. Romeo and Juliet
  53. Sense and Sensibility
  54. Silas Marner
  55. Sons and Lovers
  56. Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings
  57. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
  58. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  59. The Aeneid of Virgil
  60. The Autobiography and Other Writings
  61. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna's Counsel in Time of War
  62. The Brothers Karamazov
  63. The Call of the Wild and White Fang
  64. The Canterbury Tales
  65. The Comedy of Errors
  66. The Count of Monte Cristo
  67. The Deerslayer
  68. The Divine Comedy: Inferno
  69. The House of the Seven Gables
  70. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  71. The Invisible Man
  72. The Island of Dr. Moreau
  73. The Jungle
  74. The Last of the Mohicans
  75. The Mayor of Casterbridge
  76. The Merchant of Venice
  77. The Metamorphosis
  78. The Odyssey of Homer
  79. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
  80. The Poems
  81. The Portrait of a Lady
  82. The Postman
  83. The Prince
  84. The Prince and the Pauper
  85. The Red Badge of Courage
  86. The Souls of Black Folk
  87. The Swiss Family Robinson
  88. The Taming of the Shrew
  89. The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings
  90. The Tempest
  91. The Three Musketeers
  92. The Time Machine
  93. The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century
  94. The War of the Worlds
  95. Three Classical Tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus
  96. To Build a Fire and Other Stories
  97. Treasure Island
  98. Uncle Tom's Cabin
  99. Villette
  100. Voice That Is Great Within Us
  101. Wind in the Willows (82 Edition)

Little Women (Bantam Classics)

by Louisa May Alcott

Little Women (Bantam Classics) Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Little Women is one of the best loved books of all time. Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all ages have become a part of this remarkable family and have felt the deep sadness when Meg leaves the circle of sisters to be married at the end of Part I. Part II, chronicles Meg's joys and mishaps as a young wife and mother, Jo's struggle to become a writer, Beth's tragedy, and Amy's artistic pursuits and unexpected romance. Based on Louise May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of nineteenth-century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers.

Review:

"The American female myth."

—Madelon Bedell

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review:

"The American female myth."—Madelon Bedell

Synopsis:

Little Women is the heartwarming story of the March family that has thrilled generations of readers. It is the story of four sisters--Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth-- and of the courage, humor and ingenuity they display to survive poverty and the absence of their father during the Civil War.

About the Author

Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through her writing that she finally brought them financial independence. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,” she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

An enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals since age ten, she wrote her first melodrama at age fifteen and began publishing poems and sketches at twenty-one. Her brief service as a Civil War nurse resulted in Hospital Sketches (1863), but she earned more from the lurid thrillers she began writing in 1861 under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. These tales, with titles like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” featured strong-willed and flamboyant heroines but were not identified as Alcott’s work until the 1940s.

Fame and success came unexpectedly in 1868. When a publisher suggested she write a “girl’s book,” she drew on her memories of her childhood and wrote Little Women, depicting herself as Jo March, while her sisters Anna, Abby May, and Elizabeth became Meg, Amy, and Beth. She re-created the high spirits of the Alcott girls and took many incidents from life but made the March family financially comfortable as the Alcotts never had been. Little Women, to its author’s surprise, struck a cord an America’s largely female reading public and became a huge success. Louisa was prevailed upon to continue the story, which she did in Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886.) In 1873 she published Work: A Story of Experience, an autobiography in fictional disguise with an all too appropriate title.

Now a famous writer, she continued to turn out novels and stories and to work for the women’s suffrage and temperance movements, as her father had worked for the abolitionists. Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott both died in Boston in the same month, March of 1888.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
mrdcalip, February 12, 2007 (view all comments by mrdcalip)
Great! The best ever female novel of all time. It creates a great impact on families, friends, sisters, everyone! Even guys enjoy and appreciate the story.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(12 of 24 readers found this comment helpful)

Product Details

ISBN:
9780553212754
performance Read:
Barbara Caruso.
Author:
Auerbach, Nina
Author:
Alcott, Louisa May
Publisher:
Bantam Classics
Location:
Prince Frederick, Md.
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Girls & Women
Subject:
Family - General
Subject:
Classics
Subject:
Family
Subject:
Family life
Subject:
New england
Subject:
Mothers and daughters
Subject:
Young women
Subject:
Sisters
Subject:
Juveniles
Subject:
Audiocassettes
Subject:
Domestic fiction
Subject:
Autobiographical fiction
Subject:
March family
Series:
Bantam Classics
Series Volume:
no. 86
Publication Date:
April 1983
Binding:
Mass Market Paperbound
Grade Level:
Toddler - Up
Language:
English
Pages:
560
Dimensions:
694x428x95 59
Media Run Time:
200000
Age Level:
03-UP

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