When Louisa May Alcott was a child, her father Bronson asked her to define what a philosopher was. She replied, tongue in cheek: “a man up in a balloon with his family at the strings tugging to pull him down.” Later, as a grown woman, Alcott would write a short story loosely based on day-to-day life at Fruitlands, the short-lived utopian community her father founded in the 1840s. Titled “Transcendental Wild Oats,” the story satirized men like her father and his circle (Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and others), noting how “some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away” when it came time to harvest the crops. Throughout her life, Alcott knew how to puncture the buoyant intellectual men floating above the people stuck down in the muck of cooking and sweeping and dying in childbirth.

MEG, JO, BETH, AMY: THE STORY OF LITTLE WOMEN AND WHY IT STILL MATTERS by Anne Boyd Rioux W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pp., $27.95

This sharp perspective is easy to miss in the work for which Alcott is best known, her beloved 1868 novel Little Women. The earliest reviewers described the story of the four March sisters and their mother Marmee as “fresh,” “healthy,” “natural,” and “sincere.” In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway characterized Little Women as full of “sweetness and light.” Critics since then have largely followed suit, continuing to describe the novel as amiable and charming, though often disagreeing as to whether that was a good or bad thing. In the 1960s the British critic Brigid Brophy asserted that the novel’s sentimentality was a form of “technical skill” on Alcott’s part, whereas Mary Gaitskill, writing in 1995, criticized the story as treacly: an “impossibly sweet view of life.”

Yet Little Women is also an angry book (“I am angry every day of my life,” Marmee declares), and in a specifically feminist way. Alcott uses the structures that hem women in—marriage, home, religion—both to attract and repel her readers. The homes she depicts are both cozy and claustrophobic, the marriages companionate and perverse, and the March girls’ dreams both fulfilled and depressingly renounced. It’s certainly possible to read Little Women as an untroubled sentimental text about family bonds and individual development, but then, well, you’d miss out on the fun and insight of the novel’s deeply weird and frustrated relationship to femininity.

Writing Little Women, Anne Boyd Rioux proposes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, was a way for Alcott to explore these frustrations while also repurposing her own life story. Born in 1832, Louisa May Alcott was one of four sisters, raised in and around Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. Her education was valued and supported by her reformist and idealist parents, her writing encouraged—her father bringing her apples while she wrote up in the garret—during a time when women’s writing often was not. The Alcott family culture was whimsical and wholesome; the children spent time outdoors, full of mischief and fun. The idiosyncratic sisters had rich and contentious relationships. By early adulthood, Alcott (who never married) had achieved great professional success, earning enough money to support herself and her family through her writing. That’s the cozy story, and the one that the plot of Little Women mostly follows. In some ways, it’s true enough.

But Louisa May Alcott’s life was also full of darkness and anger. The family was itinerant, and nearly always in poverty. Bronson Alcott’s strict adherence to his “ideals”—vegetarianism, selflessness, and political commitments to use no cotton, wool, sugar, molasses, or rice—meant that his children were often improperly clothed and malnourished. He once left his wife Abigail alone with two small children so that he could focus on his studies for a year, during which Abigail weathered the first of many miscarriages on her own. Lizzie Alcott (the inspiration for the saintly Beth March) appears to have starved herself to death; her mother and sisters attended her during a protracted, painful, and utterly irredeemable death. Alcott was always keenly aware of how much she had to temper and redirect her own ambitions simply because she was a woman.