The lie of Little Women is a multifaceted one. The book, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls, is loosely inspired by Alcott’s own biography. Like Jo, she was the second of four sisters who grew up in Massachusetts under the watchful eye of an intelligent and forceful mother. Unlike Jo’s early years—in which her father is absent because, after losing the family fortune, he is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War—Alcott’s childhood was blighted by the failure of her religious-fanatic father, Bronson Alcott, to provide for his family. Stark deprivation, rather than the patchy poverty of the book, was a daily reality.

The four sisters, frequently cared for by friends and relatives, were itinerant and often obliged to live apart. Alcott’s sister Lizzie contracted scarlet fever while visiting a poor immigrant family nearby, much as Beth does in the novel. But Lizzie’s death at 22, unlike Beth’s around the same age, followed a protracted, painful decline that some modern biographers attribute to anxiety or anorexia. And while Jo was mandated by convention (and Alcott’s publisher) to pick marriage and children over artistic greatness, Alcott chose the opposite, relishing her newfound wealth and her success as a “literary spinster.”

For the first 80 or so years after Little Women was published, conflict scarcely arose over how to interpret it. Readers adored the book and its two sequels without probing for Alcott’s own feelings about them (curious though her fans were about her life). Not until 1950 did a comprehensive biography appear: Madeleine B. Stern dug into her subject’s fraught family history, and outed the grande dame of girls’ lit as the author (under a pen name) of sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction. Then, from the 1970s onward, feminist critics began examining Little Women from a new perspective, alert to the inherent discord between text and subtext. As the literary scholar Judith Fetterley argued in her 1979 essay “ ‘Little Women’: Alcott’s Civil War,” the novel is about navigating adolescence to become a graceful little woman, but the story itself pushes back against that frame. The character who continually resists conforming to traditional expectations of demure femininity and domesticity (Jo) is the true heroine, and the character who unfailingly acquiesces (Beth) dies shortly after reaching adulthood.

The blossoming of feminist criticism finally gave Little Women the thoughtful, rigorous analysis it deserved. Exploring the internal tug-of-war between the novel’s progressive instincts and the era’s prevailing constraints revealed a book that was far from pap. And yet Little Women continues to be sidelined in the American canon. Its reputation as fictional fare for and about girls and women prevents it, even now, from achieving the status of, say, Huckleberry Finn. Many male readers feel, as G. K. Chesterton put it, like “an intruder in that club of girls.” At the same time, the domestic setting and sermonizing that irked Alcott herself can strike contemporary female readers as bland and restrictive: The book’s popularity shows signs of waning among a younger audience. But the fascination with Little Women endures among writers and filmmakers, as a current surge of adaptations attests. Inspired by the challenge of bridging the gap between Alcott’s life and Alcott’s writing, efforts to renew and expand its power help illuminate complexities in a novel whose literary stature is ripe for reevaluation.