Little Women
By Louisa May Alcott

Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff at the University of Virginia, Lizzie Rusnak, Gretchen Maune

Page Images

Sources

Boston : Roberts Brothers, 1868Louisa Mae Alcott's Little Women was first published in 1868 by the Boston publishers Roberts Brothers. Our edition is derived from the Hathi Trust version of that first edition, which used a copy of the text at the library of the University of North Carolina and includes page images and the original several illustrations by Louisa's sister Abigail May Alcott, always called May. Those illustrations have rarely been reprinted. They are amateurish--May would become a professional illustrator but at this point, she was a novice--but they are worth reprinting because they remind us that the book was a kind of family project, one based on the lives of the Alcott sisters themselves, with Louisa serving as the model for Jo, May as the model for Amy, Anna as the model for Meg, and Lizzie as the model for Beth. We include audiofiles from the Librivox recording, which performs the book as a kind of play, with different readers taking on the voice of different characters.

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

Citation

Alcott, Louisa May. ; ; or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Roberts Brothers, 1868 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/Alcott/alcott-little-women. Accessed: 2025-02-05T19:29:50.723Z