It’s also the home base of her fiction, with one wishful alteration: the real Elizabeth (“Beth”) never lived there, having died soon before the Alcotts moved in.
Little Women was written at Orchard House, where Louisa lived with her family from 1858 to 1877. Meg, Beth, and Amy, predicated on Louisa’s three real sisters, are each idealized to an extent Louisa saw her own flaws far more clearly than she did theirs, or at least chose not to immortalize theirs in what would become the womanly counterpart to Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn. Jo is Alcott’s most rickety and human character, based closely on the writer herself. Joan Acocella called Louisa May Alcott’s book “more like the Old Testament than it is like a novel,” though I suspect its ancient roots go deeper still, with the March girls a quartet of essential elements: Meg in her airy, eldest elegance the flames of Jo’s temper Beth’s Hestian guardianship of all that is earthbound the sensitive rivulets of little Amy. Which one is the reigning feminine litmus test, perhaps not for the kind of girl you are but for the kind of woman you’d like to become. Most girls fancied one of the Little Women growing up.
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