TIMES 2020, los 100 mejores libros juveniles de todos los tiempos

Nominada por los estadounidenses como una de las 100 mejores novelas en la serie de PBS The Great American Read

Mujercitas, el clasico de Louisa May Alcott ambientado en la guerra de Secesion, fue publicado en Estados Unidos en 1868. Han pasado casi ciento cincuenta anos desde entonces, pero la complicidad de las cuatro hermanas March, quienes a traves de sus gestos y palabras resumen el espiritu critico de una epoca, sigue siendo fuente de inspiracion y disfrute para las generaciones de lectores que se asoman a las paginas de esta fascinante obra.

Elaine Showalter, catedratica de la Universidad de Princeton, esta considerada una de las voces mas representativas de la critica literaria feminista. En su brillante introduccion analiza en detalle las influencias de la autora, asi como el impacto de Mujercitas en la obra de escritoras de la talla de Simone de Beauvoir, Joyce Carol Oates o Cinthya Ozick.

Si fuese un chico, me escaparia contigo y lo pasariamos en grande, pero soy una pobre chica y he de comportarme con propiedad y volver a casa.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

TIMES 2020 100 Best YA of All Times

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher. The novel follows the lives of four sisters-Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March-detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, and readers demanded to know more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume, entitled Good Wives. It was also successful. The two volumes were issued in 1880 in a single work entitled Little Women. Alcott also wrote two sequels to her popular work, both of which also featured the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls. The novel addressed three major themes: domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine’s individual identity. Little Women has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth , but also as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well . According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children’s fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the All-American girl and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.