- Before women were taking online quizzes about whether they're a Carrie or Samantha, they were asking themselves, am I a Jo or an Amy?

Before there was Edward versus Jacob, there was Laurie versus Professor Bhaer.

And over the more than 150 years since "Little Women" was originally published, there have been dozens of adaptations, feature films, television adaptations, plays, ballets, operas, and at least two animations based on the original novel.

So despite being written off as proto-chick lit or kiddie Lit, or as Alcott herself once put it, "Moral pap for the young," "Little Women" has worked its way into the consciousness of readers for the last 150 years and has stayed there.

But what is it about the tale of the March sisters that keeps us coming back?

(upbeat music) For those of you who haven't read the book or seen one of these many adaptations, "Little Women" written by Louisa May Alcott and published in two parts between 1868 and 1869 is the story of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

The novel follows their trials and tribulations growing up in Concord, Massachusetts during the civil war, while their father is off serving as a chaplain in the Union Army.

They are brought up by their austere and wise mother, or Marmee, and are taught all sorts of empowering lessons about being kind, charitable, intelligent, and loving in the face of hardship.

The token boy of their world is their rich half Italian orphan friend, Laurie, who is our romantic MacGuffin for the novel.

Now in terms of plot, the book is less story-driven and more of a series of character vignettes exploring the lives of the (indistinct) little women as they leave behind childhood and into adulthood.

Giving away their Christmas breakfast.

Jo cutting off her hair for money.

Amy burning Jo's manuscripts, which has scar generations of young female writers forever.

Laurie's proposal to Jo and her rejecting him and Laurie just eventually settling for Amy.

Oh yeah and Beth dies.

Spoiler alert, I guess.

Now you might think that all this mundane, sentimental and moral lesson rearing was the kind of work that Alcott was used to writing.

But if you take a look at how the novel came to be, you find that "Little Women" was actually somewhat outside of her wheelhouse.

In September of 1867, publisher Thomas Niles wrote to Alcott to ask if she would write a book specifically targeted to young girls, but she wasn't initially wild about the idea.

Said Alcott, "Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it."

Ouch!

However, in spite of her initial animosity towards the idea, Alcott took the experiences of her life and family, and with some creative flair turned them into what would become "Little Women."

According to Anne Boyd Rioux, Alcott used the book as an opportunity to immortalize some of the aspects of her life while concealing others.

Alcott was herself, the second divorced sisters, the others being Abigail May, Elizabeth and Anna.

Roughly, Anna became Meg.

Abigail May became Amy, and Elizabeth became Beth and also died.

And Jo was basically a self-insertive Alcott.

The Alcott patriarch, Amos Bronson Alcott, was both a man very ahead of his time in terms of abolition, women's rights and education, while also being a fanatic who put his principles ahead of his family's wellbeing.

Because he was a vegan before anyone thought veganism was cool, his family wasn't allowed to eat meat or wear anything other than linen in the winter, in Concord, Massachusetts.

And he only approved the vegetables that grew upward.

So potatoes were out too.

Oh, and he left his wife while she was pregnant with their third child to go stay in a room by the Pennsylvania library so he could read.

Maybe this constant absence in his family's life is why Mr. March isn't around in the novel although Alcott gives the fictional father a more noble reason to be gone.

Thanks daddy ye!

As the Scholar Judith Fetterley writes, "Much of the popularity of "Little Women," then and now, derives from its embodiment of the cultural fantasy of the happy family, which the Alcott's both were and were not."

The Alcott sisters like the March sisters, had real artistic ambitions.

The sister who Meg is based on had dreams of being an actress just as Louisa had dreamed of becoming a famous author and May have famous artists.

And with Jo, Alcott stand in, the sheer dream to be a famous writer blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

Alcott wrote primarily as a means to provide for her family.

According to Rioux, "Writing could never be a purely artistic affair.

There was room in the Alcott family for only one self-absorbed genius."

Thanks daddy ye!

Alcott would get between 50 and $75 for each of her stories which was pretty bank for back in the day.

She actually preferred to write her revenge and saucy stuff under the pen name A.M. Barnard, to keep the Alcott brand consistent.

While Joe at first writes saucy violet short stories out of general love at the game, she ends up doing it because it makes money and because she has yet to write her real masterpiece, her in universe novel also titled, "Little Women."

Alcott successfully negotiated with her publisher so that she kept the copyright for "Little Women," which they caved on with little pressure because they didn't think it would end up being the gangbuster that it was.

Part one's initial printing sold out so quickly that the company who published it, Roberts Brothers, had trouble keeping up with demand and it's never been out of print since.

And "Little Women" wasn't just a hit with well little women, as a contemporary of Alcott's wrote, "Grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way downtown in the morning said to each other, "Have you read "Little Women?"

and laughed as they said it."

But more noteworthy and its commercial success was what "Little Women" brought to the table on the literary side of things.

According to Rioux, "What Alcott brought to children's and American literature was the fresh language of American colloquialism, and a precursor to the even more "vulgar" speech of the lower-class Huck Finn, who would appear 16 years later, in 1884."

In terms of writing, what made Alcott's work so noticeable, was the way it's so realistically captured the slang and vulgarity of everyday life without wordy purple prose.

But if the book allowed Alcott to comfortably provide for her family, it also meant that she had to deal with fans.

According to Rioux, "Their letters poured in with demands to know what would happen to the four March girls, or, most importantly, whom they would marry, "as if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life," the author grumbled.

Once the second volume was published, a lot of fans and critics, both back then and today, took real issue with Jo giving up her career to be married.

But that wasn't where Alcott had originally intended to take the character.

It was a narrative choice made with the encouragement of Alcott's publishers.

Alcott wanted Jo to be an unmarried successful writer, but that idea was a little too revolutionary for the 1860s.

As the Scholar Ann Douglas has noted, "Alcott could not disregard, however, the unpleasant facts confronting her female contemporaries and characters.

Unlike her male peers, a Victorian woman rarely had a spouse, a family, and a full-time career."

So Jo, under pressure from the publisher, had to have a husband and not a career.

- So who does she marry?

- No one, she doesn't marry either of them.

- No!

- But if Jo was going to have a happy ending, it was going to be in terms that felt real.

Alcott, much like Ryan Johnson, didn't believe in giving into fan service.

Despite the reader's wishes, Alcott refused to pair Jo up with Laurie, her dreamboat neighbor with enough money to solve all of her family's problems.

Denying 19th century readers their ultimate O.T.P.

So she gave Jo her very old, creepy old guy.

I mean, older German professor.

And the film adaptations have been trying to figure out how to make that work for over a hundred years.

Newer versions deal with it by making him either hot and or, younger.

So even though the publisher wanted the picture of mid 19th century womanhood filtered through a certain lens, Alcott's personal life is heavily infused into the final product.

And that sense of realness is a part of what has made it so enduring.

Douglas has called these sisters, "The only mythic American characters from the Victorian era unashamedly believably actively capable of love, friendship, loyalty, and sheer fun."

Rioux adds that, "Little Women" was a cultural phenomenon that knew no boundaries of age, gender, or class.

- Let's unpack that.

It is interesting to think that a book about four sis hetero white women, has managed to be so universally loved.

From the queer readings of Jo, to the race and adaptations, or books inspired by "Little Women," it is clear that there is something that connects women across the board with this novel.

It's more than just a book about a group of sisters coming of age and getting married, and perhaps it's that the March sisters have the relative freedom to be themselves and feel cherished despite society's constraints.

They feel human and tangible with their virtues and vices while also having the full ability to experience girlhood.

For a lot of marginalized people, the girlhood of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, may not be relatable, but it is as idyllic, fantastic, and magical, as the idea of getting a letter from Hogwarts.

For Alcott, the cozy world of the March's was somewhat distant from her own life of poverty, abolition, and frustration.

But there's always a need to return to a place of innocence and freedom, regardless of if it is something you've experienced or not.

As times change, we find new ways to express universal elements in "Little Women."

And I'll let you finish.

- Louisa May Alcott was raised to believe that she could be anything she wanted to be, that there were no limits in what women can do in spite of real world limitations.

Despite her initial concerns that comes through on the page, "Little Women" isn't important because it's realistic or a perfect mirror of our world, it is important because it inspired generations of women to be whole human being.

And that is worth revisiting.

- Although, you know, maybe throw in sort of adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Isabella El Dante in there for some seasoning.