Little Women

The book never names the March sisters' town, but Alcott wrote it into her own: Concord, Massachusetts, and her family home on Lexington Road. The old brown March house is drawn from Orchard House, where Alcott lived and wrote and which is now a museum; the stately stone Laurence mansion next door is drawn from the real house over the hedge; and the country-like suburb, its groves and quiet streets, is the Concord of the Alcotts, Emerson and Thoreau. Amy's later tour of Nice and Switzerland is a real excursion abroad. It brings Louisa May Alcott into the atlas.

Jo March

The March house (Orchard House), Concord

Chapter 1, Playing Pilgrims · 0% through the novel

The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, “We haven’t got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.”

The novel opens on the four sisters round the hearth, poor but together, the winter their father is away at the war. The scene is invented, but Alcott built it on the house she knew best, the brown clapboard Orchard House in Concord where she lived and wrote the book.

inspired by The book never names the town, and the March parlour is a fiction, but Alcott drew the poor, contented March household from her own family and set it on her real home. Orchard House on Lexington Road, where she wrote Little Women, is now a museum; the pin marks it.

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