Prior to Little Women, Alcott had written primarily for adults, with the exception of Flower Fables, an 1854 collection of children’s fairy stories (Alcott also edited a monthly children’s periodical, Merry’s Museum). In 1863 she had begun publishing sensational Gothic-style stories in newspapers and magazines, anonymously or under a pseudonym, mainly to earn the ready money that these popular narratives commanded. Her serious novel Moods (1864) had met with neither critical esteem nor commercial notice; but the success of Little Women turned its author into a revered, wealthy children’s book writer. The book’s popularity would seem to have been nearly ordained when one considers the circumstances of its birth and its contractual engineering. Both its publisher and its author envisioned Little Women primarily (if hopefully) as a moneymaking venture. The original publisher, Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers, had to persuade Alcott to write a tale for girls to compete with a new type of boys’ book by prolific novelists such as Horatio Alger (Ragged Dick) and Oliver Optic (Poor and Proud), which were in wide demand. Novels like these introduced a genre of children’s fiction written as entertainment, not mainly for moral instruction – a somewhat controversial innovation at the time. Alcott resisted the idea of writing a girls’ book; she doubted both her interest in a project for a young female audience and her ability to write it effectively. She claimed that she didn’t know how to accomplish the task: She wasn’t even especially concerned with the lives of girls outside her own household of four sisters. As a way to overcome her reservations, Alcott would eventually mine her own family’s experiences as the basis for Little Women’s March sisters, their characterizations, and many of their pastimes, conflicts, and daily duties. Alcott finally convinced herself that “lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can supply the need.”
The promise of earning more money to assist her financially struggling family also helped Alcott to agree to the project. Niles offered her royalties (a percentage of future sales) rather than a simple flat author’s fee paid upon acceptance of the manuscript. This was a fantastic deal: In Little Women novice writer Jo March is thrilled to be paid $300 for her first novel; although Alcott, as a better-known writer, would have received a larger flat fee than this, her royalties plan would earn her $8,500 by the end of 1869 alone. Despite Alcott’s and Niles’s initial fears that the novel’s opening chapters were too dull, and thus wouldn’t sell the book well, the first part of her fictional experiment – detailing the homey adventures through which the four New England March sisters begin to mature during one year of the American Civil War – was an immediate, unqualified best-seller.
