After the success of Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott responded to demand for a sequel by writing Good Wives which continues to chart the lives of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. 3 women, 9 men

Little Women This is a lovely and heart rending tale about the March family- Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March. Little Women is set in the 1860s in a New England town modeled on Concord, Massachusetts. The March family loses its wealth and gains so much more, love and unity. Little Women is a wonderful and brilliant story of suspense and humor, as well as lessons about the importance of honesty, hard work, true love, and family unity. A Brilliant portrayal of nineteenth-century American family life. With more than 200 illustrations by Frank T. Merrill and a picture of the Home of the Little Women by Edmund H. Garrett Part One and Two

From her eleventh year to the month of her death at age 55, Louisa May Alcott kept copious journals. She never intended for them to be published, but the insights they provide into her remarkable life are invaluable. Alcott grew up in a genteel but impoverished household, surrounded by the literary and philosophical elite of 19th-century New England, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like her fictional alter ego, Jo March, she was a free spirit who longed for independence, yet she dutifully supported her parents and three sisters with her literary efforts. In the journals are to be found hints of Alcott's surprisingly complex persona as well as clues to her double life as an author not only of ""high"" literature but also of serial thrillers and Gothic romances. This unabridged edition of Alcott's private diaries serves as a companion volume to ""The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott"", offering a record of the life of an extraordinary woman.

The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott contains a broad cross-section of letters from the correspondence of the creator of Little Women and provides a compelling autobiography of this most autobiographical of writers. Spanning a period of forty-five years, this collection provides vivid accounts of Alcott's life and development as a writer. Episodes in Alcott's life are candidly reflected: her youth, when the prototype of Jo March was already being shaped; the 1868 publication of Little Women and the prosperity and renown the book brought its author; her never-ending struggles for her family; the final years spent caring for her niece and an invalid father. Alcott's letters also furnished a vent for the pressures she felt to write a sequel to Little Women and play matchmaker for the novel's heroine. Writing to a friend in early 1869, Alcott remarked that "Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didnt dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her. I expect vials of wrath to be poured out upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect." The correspondence sheds light on Alcott's relationship with her publishers, such friends as Emerson and Thoreau, and members of her family. Of particular note are her observations--many of them firsthand--on such major issues of the day as abolition, the Civil War, and the women's rights movement.