"Little Women" may be a classic, but it's no fairy tale

Many readers and reviewers describe Little Women as sweet, wholesome, light — either to praise it or to pan it.

They’re both missing the point, argues writer and professor Sarah Blackwood.

Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel has endured not because of those characteristics, but rather because of how it reveals the author’s complex relationship with femininity.

Blackwood examines this and many other insights from Anne Boyd Rioux’s book Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters in an essay in The New Republic.