Little Women

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Most of the novels from the 19th century that have endured are either adventure novels or romances, yet Little Women devotes much of its length to episodic, small domestic dramas about children growing up. Why do you think this book has endured? What’s important or meaningful in stories about children?

Teaching Suggestion: This question will help students consider what kind of novel they’re about to read. It will be good to get them thinking about how the novel focuses on character dynamics or relationships instead of plot (particularly in Part I), and develops the theme of Home and Family as Final Destination.

2. There are now two critically-acclaimed film adaptations of Little Women, Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version and Greta Gerwig’s 2019 version. If you’ve seen either or both of these films, what do you expect will be different in the novel? Whether you’ve seen the adaptations or not, why do you think this book has been an enduring piece of American culture?

Teaching Suggestion: Both film versions are recontextualizations of the source material (the Gerwig film, in particular, casts Jo’s marriage and happy ending as a fiction written by Jo herself to be more palatable to 19th-century audiences).