SOURCE: "Reading for Profit and Pleasure: Little Women and The Story of a Bad Boy, "The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1994, pp. 143-53.

In the following excerpt, Donovan places Little Women in the context of the development of children's literature. Though Alcott incorporated lessons for self-improvement in her work, she opposed didacticism.

Fiction written in the United States specifically for children changed fundamentally in 1868 and 1869 with the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, part I, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy. In these two novels, we see the development of a new narrative strategy that mirrors a new awareness or understanding of children's experience and a trust in the child reader's abilities to interpret and judge.

Alcott's Little Women and Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy were written in opposition to the didacticism of contemporary children's literature. In both novels, we...