SOURCE: Afterword, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Bantam, 1983, pp. 461-70.

Auerbach's look at Alcott's life and work suggests that although Meg, Jo, and Amy had to accept marriage as their fates, Alcott actually idealized feminist utopias that excluded marriage and men.

For those of us who entered the March household as children, its power is unabated. Adult women remember life with Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy when their own childhoods have grown dim. For better or worse, the March family has passed into American folk mythology. Though Alcott had hoped only for transient commercial appeal, by 1890 Ednah Cheyney, her first biographer, could claim: "Already twenty-one years have passed, and another generation has come up since she published [Little Women], yet it still commands a steady sale; and the mothers who read it in their childhood renew their enjoyment as they watch the faces of the little girls...