At Plumfield, an experimental school for boys, the little scholars can do very much as they please, even slide down banisters. For this is what writer Jo Bhaer, once Jo March of Little Women, always wanted- a house ‘swarming with boys … in all stages of … effervescence.’ At the end of Little Women, Jo inherited the Plumfield estate from her diamond-in-the-rough Aunt March. Now she and her husband, Professor Bhaer, provide their irrepressible charges with a very different sort of education -

and much love. In fact, Jo confesses, she hardly knows ‘which I like best, writing or boys.’ Here is the story of the ragged orphan Nat, spoiled Stuffy, wild Dan, and all the other lively inhabitants of Plumfield, whose adventures have captivated generations of readers.

‘A natural source of stories … she is, and is to be, the poet of children.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘The novelist of children … the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the schoolroom.’ Henry James

‘The best boys-in the literary sense-that we have ever come across.’ London Spectator

With a new introduction by John Matteson and an afterword by J.T. Barbarese