Louisa May Alcott: 21 Books Free to Read Online
Alcott wrote Little Women because her publisher asked for a girls' book and she did not want to. She said so in her journal — "never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters" — wrote it in about ten weeks, thought it dull, and was wrong. It made the family solvent for the first time in her life, which had been the point: her father Bronson Alcott was a philosopher of the kind who founds a utopian farm and lets it fail, and Louisa had been the one earning since she was a teenager.
That is the useful thing to know before reading her, because the money is always in the books. Her plots turn on what a girl can be paid for, what a household costs, and who is supporting whom. She wrote potboilers and lurid thrillers under a pseudonym for cash, and the respectable children's books are the same writer with the same eye.
Twenty-one are in the free library.
The March books, in order
1. Little Women (1868) — read it even if you think you know it, because the film versions soften a book that is much sharper than its reputation. Jo's anger is real anger, the poverty is specific, and the chapter where Amy burns the manuscript is not a scrape. 2. Little Men (1871) — Jo runs a school at Plumfield. It is the closest Alcott came to writing about her father's actual experiment in education, and the interest is in watching a theory be tested on twelve difficult children. 3. Jo's Boys (1886) — the Plumfield boys grown up, and the last book she finished. It is the angriest and most feminist thing she wrote: Nan becomes a doctor and stays unmarried on purpose, and the book approves.
The Campbell books, which are the best of the rest
4. Eight Cousins (1875) — Rose Campbell, orphaned and rich, handed around seven aunts until an uncle with modern ideas takes over her upbringing. Funnier than the March books and much less pious. If you have read Little Women and want the next one, take this. 5. Rose in Bloom (1876) — Rose at eighteen deciding what to do with a fortune and which cousin, if any, to marry. Contains a genuinely unsparing account of one cousin's alcoholism.
The standalone novels
- An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) — a country girl among rich city cousins, and the second half jumps forward six years into her supporting herself as a music teacher in a boarding house. That second half is the most autobiographical writing she published under her own name.
- Under the Lilacs (1878) — a runaway circus boy and his dog taken in by two sisters. Lighter, and the best of hers to read aloud to someone young.
- Jack and Jill (1880) — a village story that opens with a sledding accident and spends the year on the recovery. Notable for being about a whole town rather than one family.
- Flower Fables (1854) — her first book, written at sixteen for Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter. Fairy stories, and interesting mostly as a starting point.
The story collections, which is where she actually worked
Magazine stories paid the bills, and Alcott produced them for decades. The collections are uneven by design — a good one and a slight one sit side by side — but the good ones are as strong as anything in the novels and much shorter.
- Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 1: My Boys — sketches of real boys she had known, closer to memoir than fiction.
- Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 2: Shawl-Straps — travel writing, three women going round Europe on very little money. Genuinely funny and completely unlike the rest of her.
- Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 5: Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore
- Lulu's Library, Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 — stories told to her niece, collected late in her life. Volume 2 is the strongest.
- A Garland for Girls (1888) — her last book, published the year she died. Working girls, mostly, and each story is named after a flower.
- Kitty's Class Day and Other Stories
- Shoes and Stockings
- A Modern Cinderella — the title story is a Cinderella with the magic removed and the housework left in, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Alcott handled a fairy tale.
- Marjorie's Three Gifts — short, and a good ten minutes if you want to sample her.
- The Louisa Alcott Reader — a school reader assembled after her death from her simplest stories. For a child reading alone for the first time.
What is not here
The thrillers. Alcott wrote sensation fiction under the name A. M. Barnard — Behind a Mask, A Long Fatal Love Chase — full of drugs, disguise, bigamy and women manipulating men for money, and they are startling next to the children's books. Most were not identified as hers until the 1940s and are not yet on the free shelves. Hospital Sketches, her account of six weeks nursing Union soldiers in Washington before typhoid nearly killed her, is also missing, and it is the book that made her name before Little Women did.
How to read four and stop
Little Women, then Eight Cousins for the funniest, then An Old-Fashioned Girl for the one closest to her own life, then Jo's Boys for what she thought at the end. That is the whole writer.
All of it is free
Every book above is public domain and readable in the browser here, with nothing to install and no account needed to start. They are all on one author page.
By shelf: 5 books about sisters, 19 more filed under family, 3 novels of New England life and 24 books about orphans, which is the engine of most of her plots. And for the same feeling from a different writer, our books like Anne of Green Gables list, or the boarding school stories for the Plumfield side of her.