SOURCE: "Louisa May Alcott: The Influence of Little Women," in Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and New York, edited by Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier, Transaction Books, 1982, pp. 20-26.

In the following essay, Heilbrun argues that Little Women's Jo has been a model of female autonomy for twentieth-century women artists.

The influence of Little Women upon women artists in Paris between the wars is a matter of faith. As the Bible tells us, faith is the evidence of things not seen. If only Gertrude Stein had written of Jo March, or at least stopped into Sylvia Beach's bookshop and requested Little Women. What she requested, I am constrained by truth to report, is The Trail of the Lone some Pine and A Girl of the Limberlost.¹ There is a reference to Alcott in Stein's writing, but not to Little Women. It is...