How Jo March Finds Her Voice as a Writer in Little Women

The first time Jo March wins money for a story, she spends it on a trip to the seaside for Beth and Marmee. Much later, after Beth dies, Jo can barely bring herself to open her writing desk. Put those moments side by side and you can see why writing matters so much in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It gives Jo a way to earn money, care for her family, and eventually put into words what it feels like to lose one of the people who first took her talent seriously.

This essay discusses major plot developments in both parts of Little Women.

The March sisters are Jo’s first audience

Jo starts out writing plays the sisters can perform at home. In the Christmas rehearsals, she wants Amy to faint convincingly, Meg knows how to carry a scene, and Beth is so absorbed in the performance that she lets the bread burn. The play is full of things Jo loves to invent, including a witch with a cauldron and a villain who dies spectacularly, then sits up and rubs his elbows.

The comedy tells us something about Jo’s early confidence. At home, she has people willing to try out whatever she dreams up. Her sisters also give her immediate feedback. Jo can hear when a speech lands and see when a faint looks ridiculous. Long before an editor pays her, the March household gives her a place to practice writing for an audience.

Jo’s first prize shows what writing can buy

In Chapter 27, “Literary Lessons,” Jo sees a newspaper offering a hundred dollars for a sensational story. She begins plotting almost immediately, weighing where to put the duel, the elopement, and the murder. She sets the story in Lisbon and finishes it with an earthquake. The sheer number of disasters is part of the joke, but Alcott gives the prize real weight. It pays for a seaside trip that does Beth and Marmee good, and the editor’s letter gives Jo encouragement after years of effort.

Alcott makes the marketplace harder to read once Jo publishes a novel. She revises it to please several family members, then receives reviews that seem to describe entirely different books. One reader praises its wholesomeness while another calls it dangerous. The episode captures a problem Jo will have to solve for herself. Everyone has an opinion about what her book should be, and following all their advice can leave her with a story she hardly recognizes.

After Beth dies, Marmee gives Jo a reason to start again

In Chapter 42, “All Alone,” Marmee asks Jo to write something for the family. The invitation is small enough to accept. Jo can sit down with a half-finished manuscript and think about the people in the next room instead of imagining a verdict from strangers.

Her family laughs and cries over the resulting story. Her father sends it to a magazine over her objections, and the magazine pays for it and asks for more. The sequence brings Jo back to the beginning of her writing life. Once again, her family is her first audience. This time, the humor and grief that move them reach people outside the house, too.

Jo credits her parents and Beth when her father tells her she has found her style. That moment gives Beth a place in the story of Jo’s career. Beth was the sister who watched the plays and cheered Jo on when the audience could fit inside one room. After her death, Jo carries that relationship into work that strangers can read and recognize something of themselves in.

What Jo still wants at the end of Little Women

By the final chapter, Jo is helping run the school at Plumfield. She still hopes to write a good book someday and wonders whether she’ll have more to say after she has lived longer. That hope is easy to miss amid the marriages and the family gathering, but it leaves her writing life open. She knows from experience what a check can do for her family, how confusing praise can be, and how much it matters to write for people she cares about. The good book she still imagines has room for all three lessons.

Read the novel — Read both parts of Little Women free at Project Gutenberg.

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