Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy

Collector's Edition. Large 8vo. xiii, 428, [1] pp. Portrait frontispiece. With colour and black and white illustrations by Henry C. Pitz. Publisher's Preface. Introduction by Edward Weeks. Bound in gilt embossed full tan leather, raised bands to gilt lettered spine, smyth sewing and concealed muslin joints. Printed on archival paper gilt edged in 22kt gold. Peach silk moiré endpapers with matching silk sewn-in ribbon marker. In "The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series.

A coming-of-age novel originally published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, by Roberts Brothers, Boston. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, the story follows the lives of the four March sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy from childhood to womanhood. An immediate commercial and critical success, Alcott quickly completed a second volume (published as Good Wives in the United Kingdom). The two volumes were re-issued in 1880 as a single novel titled Little Women. Alcott subsequently wrote two sequels featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). The books served to introduce a new publishing category with a domestic focus that paralleled boys' adventure stories, and over the years writers as diverse as Margaret Atwood, and J. K. Rowling have noted the influence of Jo March on their artistic development.